Where It Hurts

Last week we baptized a house. Marlene, the oldest daughter of a neighbor’s family, built a new house a few doors down from her family and is moving her bodega, turkeys and the office of her sister Manuela’s obstetrician’s practice into their new headquarters. Since two businesses will share the house, two different blessing ceremonies took place. I was invited to be the padrino (godfather) for the blessing of the obstetrician’s office.

Not just anyone can baptize a house so they had to bring in a professional, Paola, from Monsefú. They also invited many guests, among them two of the four brothers in the family and their wives and children. One of the brothers has three daughters that everyone calls “the gringas.” I’d previously attempted to elicit explanations. Was their mother a gringa? Had one of their grandparents been a gringo and had they inherited a recessive gene for blue eyes or blond hair? It turned out that the three daughters are albinas.

Marlene and Manuela provide much of the basic medical care for Callanca. Marlene studied pharmacology and sells a variety of medicines in her bodega. In Perú you don’t need a prescription for anything. You can get codeine, antibiotics, syringes, heart and high-blood-pressure medications, viagra—anything—just for the asking. Marlene and Manuela also administer injections, stitch up wounds and offer other essential medical services at a lower cost than the “posta” or medical post, which is often closed when people need it most. Marlene and Manuela are on call twenty-four hours a day. All you have to do is tap on the window of the bodega with a coin as if you wanted an Inca Kola or half a kilo of lard and tell them where it hurts.

Whereas in the U.S. all people do is hang up a framed, cross-stitched “God Bless This Home” fetish and figure that will get the job done, in Perú the process of securing such a blessing is much more formal and interesting. Paola placed a small, clear glass pitcher containing water and cruda, a sweetly fragrant wildflower, on the counter of the apothecary where Marlene would be doing business. She faced the pitcher with her prayer book and we, the visitors, crowded in behind her. She read a formal blessing from the book and paused occasionally for us to repeat pasages. We sang several verses of a psalm dedicated to Santa María Auxiliadora.

The godparents of Marlene’s bodega were asked to take the pitcher of water, turn the cruda plants upside down in liquid, and use the flowers to spinkle holy water along the baseboards and in the corners of the rooms. We repeated this procedure—the blessings, the song and the sprinkling of the holy water—in Manuela’s consultorio. This time I was the godfather so I did the sprinkling of the holy water. It’s easy to see why they chose cruda as the plant with which to perform this blessing or purification. Its smell puts to shame any incense whose powers a priest might’ve brought to bear upon the situation.

Previously I’d noticed a plastic bag containing a small bottle of liquid hanging from the lintel of the entrance to the apothecary. It turned out to be champagne. The three godparents were invited to carry out the last step in the blessing ritual. Marlene handed me a small hammer and asked me to strike the bottle once—but not with enough force to break it. When I did so the bottle rang like a bell. Another of the godparents, Marlene’s sister-in-law, took the hammer, struck the bottle of champagne, and this time it broke. The plastic bag filled with foam. Marlene’s brother, my co-godfather, tore open a corner of the bag and a thin stream of champagne arc-ed out and wet the threshold of the entrance to Marlene’s new home. My guess would be that the hardcore version the ritual calls for the smashing of a bottle of champagne against the door jamb but that the ritual has been modernized a bit to allow for a speedier post-baptism cleanup.

After the blessing Marlene and her sisters served food and plenty of it—spicy garbanzo beans, chunks of pork and beef. Then turkey with a thick yellow sauce made of ground rice. Marlene passed around a decanter of her homemade wine and a two-liter bottle of Pepsi from the bodega. We talked and celebrated and congratulated Marlene. Her house is impressive by Callanca standards—two bedrooms, kitchen, dining room, sitting room and the large room that will house the bodega. It’s made of cement and painted bright pink. Black wrought-iron fences the entrance and protects the windows. The interior walls are painted in pastels—yellow, blue and pink. The floors are tile. For sure it wouldn’t pass code in the U.S. but here it’s a palace.

Maybe it had something to do with having visited Marlene´s apothecary and lay practitioner’s office, but I picked up my first parasite later in the week. It’s called a pique. It’s some form of louse that lives on pigs. But right now it’s embedded in the heel of my left foot. It resembles a callous or corn except with a dark brown spot at the crown which I take to be the pique itself. I’m supposed to visit the posta to have it removed.

A couple of the artesanas and I attended a marinera competition the weekend following the blessing of Marlene’s new house. The artesanas wanted to check out the elaborate dresses of the señoritas and see if they could maybe steal a few designs. The marinera is an intricate courtship dance particular to northern Perú. The couples dress as peasants and flirtatiously pursue and evade one another in circles of ever-diminishing diameter as the marinera progresses, both dances flourishing embroidered handkerchiefs and, in the case of the men, large palm-straw hats. It’s spectacular and the categories include all age groups from 5-year-olds to 75-year-olds. The atmosphere is a lot like a U.S. gymnastics competition. The mothers of the youngest participants are uniformly obnoxious, demanding and fanatical and the judges arbitrary, capricious and sour.

A full military brass band provided the musical acommpaniment and the participants competed in groups of three in front of six judges. The winners of each round advanced to the next. The competitions lasted from mid-afternoon until midnight. We stayed long enough to watch all the categories of contestants complete one round of qualifying. I took a lot of fotos so that the artesanas can copy the designs they liked.

I in fact went to the posta the Monday after the marinera competition and they removed the pique. The nurse asked for the largest needle available in the pharmacy, swabbed my heel with alchohol and began to dig at the hard mound of flesh in which the pique had embedded itself. If you’ve ever dug a splinter out of your finger with a needle then you have a good concept of what the procedure involved. Just imagine a much larger needle and a much livelier splinter. The nurse explained as she picked apart the insect and the bloody meat surrounding it that the piques penetrate your skin and begin to burrow, nourishing themselves with your flesh as they proceed deeper therein. Eventually they lay eggs and, if you do nothing to stop them, the eggs hatch and the next generation of piques starts to chow down. That’s why it’s important to remove not just the pique but all the surrounding tissue. When she’d finished, the nurse showed me the remains of the dismembered pique and the chunks of dead skin she’d removed, washed the wound with three or four kinds of antiseptics, and told me to wear socks and shoes next time.