coldhearted scientist وداد

This is one of the fragments I wrote to recover from severe culture shock after returning to the opulent United States from Lima.

Because of possible pickpockets some people are afraid to shop at Lima’s central market, which I like. But the members of my household who live mostly in the United States do go to the Gamarra market for clothes, brought directly from the textile factories to you. Deals at Gamarra are very good and the market even has a website which is deceptively bourgeois. The family goes by taxi and they take the maid with them as a lookout. This is not the kind of family that makes maids carry packages, but on these occasions she insists – her theory being that she will be the person best able to hold onto the goods if assaulted.

While they are shopping the family is very absorbed. They think and talk fast. My job is to translate the prices into dollars. (The sellers can do it as fast as I can and do not lie, but I am more trusted to make an honest calculation.) Once they finish shopping, though, fear takes over again and they rush away. It is the only time I have ever seen them too anxious to bother bargaining with a cab driver. I realized just how rattled they were when one cab driver approached the house from an artery other than the one they are most familiar with. Where are you taking us? they asked, and then started to argue about routes, confusing the cabbie.

I am a foreigner and I knew we were going somewhere dangerous, and I have spent enough time in Mexico and Brazil to mistrust cab drivers as much as I mistrust anyone else. I had studied a map of the district very well before leaving the house, so I knew we were really only about three blocks from home at this point and that we were pointed in the right direction. Only I knew this, though, and being a foreigner, I was considered the least reliable narrator by one and all. It took me several minutes to convince everyone that we should just keep on going. After driving a block, someone else recognized a familiar building, and only then could a collective sigh of relief be breathed.

This video of a police raid in the relevant district shows why I had studied the map. Watch at your own risk. The reporter’s heart is racing – you can hear it in her voice. My disagreement with the video involves the reporter’s primary focus on the (putative) moral failings of individual thieves, and not the dark Satanic Mills.

Axé.