The Cardboard House

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The cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean are only a ten-minute bus ride away from the dirty, crowded, ash-colored streets of downtown Lima. Beyond the city: the clear tender chasm of the sea. Walking south on the esplanade that winds along the edge of these cliffs, you soon reach the last stretch on the way to Chorrillos, zigzagging, seascape in relief, carved with a knife, a sailor’s toy. Along the way, you are flanked on your left by the sea that is never glaucous, but instead has pale, colorless zones, lined with the tracks of ducks, full of minute coasts and feeble backgrounds. Scattered here and there along Barranco’s esplanade are ancient gardens of fragile roses and dirty and dwarfed palm trees. with one hour of quietude: six o’clock in the afternoon.

Continuing in the same direction, you happen upon the plaza of Barranco: there is a pond, trees with bulbous trunks and thorns and bright pink flowers, and a plaster of Paris Eros with a terrible parrot perched on its head. The avenues leading out from the plaza are lined with jacaranda trees that produce many purple flowers. a solemn, old-fashioned, confidential, expressive, gaudy, mindful, family tree. A newspaper vendor stands on one corner, and his Crónica and Comercio newspapers are blown about until the cart threatens to roll backwards. On another street corner stands a pretty native woman with her hard, shiny, damp head of hair — a mud carving — selling her single cigarettes and chewing gum.

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