Over the past two weeks I feel like I have been doing fieldwork on how to tell a body to move when it cannot or should not. When there is something on the line- in my case, the connection between my nervous system and my right leg, a future full of hikes with my partner, daily runs that help me to unpack ideas that had previously only been ramblings or notes scribbled in margins of printed pages- a war brews. On one hand, I want to reassure myself that everything will be okay. Flexing my leg upwards, or lifting myself up is reassuring. If I can do this now, I will be able to do it. This seems like a silent but firm biocultural drive. I can. Look. Proof. My leg moves. Keep it warm. Warm those nerves. Let's get walking. The other arbiter is a voice that conjures a frantic, but firm bricolage of what I have digested, and understood from the doctors I have seen. I look at that hanging leg and say, "Jamie. Great. But if you keep doing shit like that you may lose the ability to do these things later. It will take forever to heal. There will be no more Andes for you-- like period. Or, like, without surgery, you hubric jackass." I listen...though, that voice competes with sirens, shouts from the park, dogs barking, shadows shifting on my lime bedroom walls. Another night falls upon Lima. It's all happening, right there, just outside. And I am in here like a netted dolphin. Enacting depression and dramas when I'm really damn lucky to be alright. Not everyone who gets into a "simple combi accident" fares so well, after all.
Today in the car on the way home from the hospital, Dr. Relezgi stopped her car at a gas station in Miraflores. A man with thick, black hair approached our window and asked the routine petrol questions: how much? of what? She handed over her card. She had been telling me on a date she had gone on with an "Indian." Apparently they had a nice chat over coffee one night. He was a representative of an Andean pharmaceutical company. I imagine this man lived in a city, but perhaps was born in a surrounding community and played up that connection in order to sell these natural alternatives to harder, more chemical products. He called her about a half an hour after she got home, and was breathing heavily, the Dr. said. She did not want to see him anymore. Seven years later, and he is still emailing, facebooking. "Those men want things their way, or no way," she warned. I looked up beyond her windshield-- at the roundabout. Hundreds of little sedans, taxis, combis....weaving in and out. So move movement. "There is no Lima without the Sierra, and no Sierra without Lima" I commented out loud, immediately realizing how trite I sounded to her. "I mean, your hospital, every person who worked there as a sanitary assistant seems like they could easily be from somewhere else. I met three nannies in the waiting room there with the children they are paid to manage for Limenan families. There is so much movement back and forth, not only between these two zones, but different neighbhorhoods in the city. Different geographies cross-sustain each other. All of this transport, movement, connection technology, makes that increasingly possible."
What a rant. She smiled at me, and we kept driving. "Our workers must look like slaves to you, the maids and nannies. It is not so normal to have one in your house all of the time in the US, right?"
"Right, but in no way to I look at this situation in that way. It is just a different way of doing things, I guess. And it seems like household workers, if they work out, end up becoming some kind of kin after a while."
She was delighted at this comment and regaled me with stories of those who work in her mother's house. She told me of the woman who helps out her mother now. She stays late before going home because she likes to. Then there was the betrayal her father felt years before when he had to fire the woman who raised her because she was stealing. The heartbreak when later a man he "brought down from the sierra" to work as a driver and "showed how to live in the city" ran away with one of the maids and stole her sister's cell phone. We stopped to get something to eat, because we both knew I'd be stuck in bed for days after this hospital trip. I shuffled slowly up the ramp to the pizzeria. It is damn near impossible to move around in Lima when you are slow, unless someone drives you, and helps you up and in places. The traffic feels like a sea of darting, apathetic and starving barracudas. Cross walks are out of the question seeing if you can't run, you shouldn't step out into one. Though, the combis and cars stopped for older women and men with canes--maybe I needed a cane. Some sort of visual marker that I cannot move very fast, like others who might look my age.
The pizza was incredible. I packed up the rest for home, and got back in her car. Over lunch we talked about dads. This tends to happen between folks who have both lost theirs to some strange and stupid illness. Hers died a fews years back also, maybe 5, during her residency. He was an air force pilot during the "civil war." She has absolutely no patience for Humala because she thinks he is a Sendero apologist and cannot fathom giving them status as a political party (something some are afraid might happen during his tenure as president).
"Jamie, they fried policemen alive in huge frying pans with oil, and laughed. I don't care how much suffering and inequality there is. At least have the decency to execute people quickly. There is no reason to pardon any of that. I don't want those men walking around the street with me. Like equal citizens."
Oddly enough, during this conversation I realized my Australian friend, Chris, was on Lima Limon-- a game show that allows women to say "yes" or "no" to men competing for their attention. He won. We laughed about the show-- I called Chris' work to make sure it was him. "Si, es loco." He hardly speaks Spanish.
Dr. R said that in one sense she envied people like him-- traveling the world, working in different cities illegally, partying. I agreed. I loved being around Chris for a night or so-- but at the end of the day I care more now about security (whatever that means) and doing something every day that makes sense to me long term. Getting old. The girls on the show wore clothing that to me looked like stripper-gear. Nope, the doctor informed me that that was normal lady-fare for clubs, etc.
"But, you know, I am embarrassed for girls like that. Our grandmothers fought damn hard for the right for me to be in this Dr's coat. For you to be able to study at the University, and what do they do with it? Tart around, count on marrying rich."
On the way home I tried to appreciate, as best I could, all of the people I could see. I knew when we got there, I would hobble up into my bed, and try to write or read. So, here I am.
Maybe saying that this whole experience has been fieldwork on limited mobility in a big city...is as presumptuous as saying that livejournaling as a teenager was protofieldworking. I do not know. What I do know now is how transport systems, the urgent need to move millions of people hours a day, quickly, with little pay, inscribes itself on the body in the form of accidents and injuries. I also know, now, that getting bad advice from "el hospital de los pobres" is often the only choice many of those I work with have. Maybe my fieldwork has been cut down a bit (derp), but it still feels like work. My mind never officially shuts off, and watch out, because now I can read and write.
and hey--maybe waxing poetic over the sound of industrial AC units outside of office buildings in downtown St. Pete was some sort of unwitting fieldwork after all? I don't really feel qualified to say.
For now, it's bedrest-- save the daily walk to the clinic to pay someone to stick me with a needle full'a steroids.
