Patina - Sarah Little
The streets are warm, sunny, with less of the ozone-free heat that I’m so used to from my New Zealand hometown. They’re steep, here in Cusco, and I have to pay special attention when I’m walking down the slopes, otherwise I’ll slip.
My ballet flats, usually so comfortable and easy to walk in, are skidding on the ground - the pavement is worn, smooth, and the narrow walking space is crammed with people. Make haste slowly, I tell myself. My travel insurance might cover a broken ankle, but my rudimentary Spanish, some of which was crammed in on the plane with a hastily-purchased ebook, will not.
I can order an empanada here, and count out change after buying a coffee, but I cannot explain I slipped because the streets here are older and smoother and narrower to the ones I’m used to, and I should have been more careful.
Normally I carry headphones, but when getting ready for this trip I decided to leave them behind, and now I can hear everything in full - as I’m picking my way down the angle of the street, my ears are picking up on Spanish, and the air here feels different. Listening to the Spanish doesn’t help much, and I’m relying on the written signs to tell me where food is.
The empanada is hot in my fingers, and I switch it from hand to hand as I walk. There’s a little grease-patch on the paper bag, and the sun is bold in the sky even as the clouds drift deeper and darker.
There’s a cart with cold drinks, and I stop, count some sol to buy a Coca-Cola, stumbling over my request for it to be sin azúcar, hoping I’m saying it properly. The glass in my hand is different, shaped and labelled not what I was expecting. With something as universal as Coke, I realise, I was expecting it to be the same as what I buy back home. Hands full now, I wrap the empanada - still hot - in a tissue and pop it into my bag, freeing up my hand to flag a man carrying a case of churros. It’s not hard to convey that I want the ones with chocolate, they’ll be a good way to cap off an impromptu early dinner.
I’m near the park by now, and there’s a natural-history museum. I grab a bench and watch people stream past as I eat, and when I’m down to half the Coke I tuck it awkwardly into my bag, wander along to the museum.
It’s neither bigger nor smaller than I expected, looking at it from the outside, and my flats patter softly on the wooden floor as I take in the exhibits of spiders, monkeys, great cats whose bodies were built for more than just chasing sparrows. There’s the odd bit of chatter from people, parents showing their kids around, or maybe a school trip, but it brushes over me as I inspect the various creatures and wonder what I might encounter in the cloudforest.
Eventually I’ve perused all the exhibits, and I leave, venturing back onto the streets and blinking away the sunlight. Here, the streets are flat, but I still feel the lack of traction of them under my densely-soled shoes - worn down by centuries of use, and if I stop to look I see ancient stone, not recently-mixed concrete with its faintly flecky appearance.
There are no names written in the pavement, no sloppily-carved E + H, no half-shoeprint left from someone walking too quickly across the still-setting concrete. It’s almost cobblestones, and I wonder to myself how well the manmade version will hold up back home, centuries from now.
I walk past a cafe-slash-ice-cream place, and pause to read the menu - I can decipher enough to understand sandwiches, coffee, sweet things. I’ll have to come back here next time I’m looking for lunch, maybe once I get back from the hike. Slowing my pace past the window, I try to peer inconspicuously in, eyeing up the rows of ice-cream.
It reminds me a bit of a gelato shop I know at home, the same neat rows of tubs with their little scoops tucked inside. I smile, and hurry on, suddenly self-conscious.
Walking the perimeter of the park, I’m struck by how old everything is. New Zealand is a relatively young country, I’ve always known this, but that’s a different matter from standing outside of a church several hundred years older than my home. Standing there, I try to wrap my mind around the stretch of centuries, the sheer number of years between then and now. All I come up with is a blank space, really.
There’s another drinks cart at the outskirts of the park, and I want to get back to my hotel - I’ve almost run out of cash for the day.
I stop at the cart, swap my last few sol for another Coke, and the coldness of the can shocks me, grounds me to me, here in the twenty-first century, clasping something people recognise the world over; something fathomable, tangible.
The city around me is darkening into evening, streets glowing in dusk. In this moment, surrounded by strangers and history, I feel timeless, the youth of my adulthood dispersing under the weight of the city’s centuries.
(later, back in my hotel room, the illusion breaks and fades away)
When she’s not browsing through stacks of books or watching mysteries, Sarah Little is a poet and sometimes story-teller. Her first poetry pamphlet was "Snapshots" (Broken Sleep Books, 2019) and most recently she's been exploring fairy-tale motifs while branching out into fiction. Her most recent publications have been pieces in tattie zine, The Tide Rises and Tree and Stone, among others.
