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bottom to catch us if we fell.
    We stayed for a few days in a rundown colonial hotel in Huancayo inhabited by European and North American hippies. There was only one bathroom and one shower for everyone, so the lineups in the morning were long. Each room had a pail for emergencies, though. Mami and Bob disappeared every day until dinnertime. This time, our only instructions were to stay in the hotel room. Nothing was said about making a phone call at the twenty-four-hour mark. I couldn’t decide if that meant things were less dangerous here or more so.
    On the all-night bus to Ayacucho, I watched the stars of the southern hemisphere from my window. We were in the Andes now, the mountains my parents and their friends referred to constantly, and it felt right to be there. At one point we passed a burning village in the distance. The flames licked the sky. Everyone around me was asleep, and I wondered if the bus driver would stop and get us to help, but he didn’t. Our vessel continued on through this landscape of beauty and horror.
    There were rallies in the streets of Ayacucho, and Mami and Bob whispered about a civil war. It was the first time I’d heard them use the term. Something was different here in Peru, and it had to do with those words. I knew from earlier conversations that the general in power, Francisco Morales Bermúdez, was dangerous to us because he participated in Operation Condor, which had been set up by Pinochet and the surrounding dictatorships to catch revolutionaries operating anywhere in South America. Operation Condor was an illegal, top secret affair, officially denied by the governments in question, but foreigners in Peru were disappearing all the time. There was a new movement rising in the country, based right here in Ayacucho, and its members believed that peasants, not the working class, should lead the war against the powers that be and take over the cities.
    Late at night, when Ale and I were supposed to be sleeping, Bob took photographs of papers that he’d taped to the wall. In Lima, he and Mami had read photos of documents. Now they were the ones producing the photos. Whenever a roll of film was done, Bob would hide it deep in his backpack. On our last morning in Ayacucho, very early, Bob wrapped the rolls of film in plastic, put them in a small cardboard box and taped the box shut. He grabbed his wallet and passport and slipped out of the room. When he came back, he announced that we were going to have fun that day. We bought chirimoya ice cream and ate it sitting in the square. Then we all had diarrhea. That was the thing about Peru. If you didn’t have diarrhea, you were either puking or doubled over in pain, because your gut was seizing. My mother said it was good for us to build up our immune systems.
    At dawn the following day we boarded a bus for Cusco, which Bob explained had been the capital of the Inca empire. For the next twenty-four hours we wound our way along narrow Andes roads so high up that sometimes we looked down on the clouds. We passed tiny villages and flocks of llamas tended by four-year-old shepherds wearing sandals made from tires. Every so often the bus would stop for a villager who needed to travel only a little ways, and he or she rode for free, chitchatting in Quechua with the driver. Quechua was the native tongue of the Andes, and ever since Huancayo, it was pretty much all we’d heard.
    Every so often the driver would stop and yell out: “Time to go to the bathroom!” Everyone would scurry off the bus. Ale and I knew better by now than to look for the toilet; everyone just went over a little hill and squatted. The ladies and children went over one little hill, and the men went over another. In Peru, if you wanted to look up the definition of a word, you’d need two dictionaries: the Poor Peru dictionary and the Rich Peru dictionary. If you looked up the word bathroom in the Poor Peru dictionary, the definition would be: