social lubrication

27/10/2009

I was thoughtfully fingering the outline of the miniature logo on the clear, well-weighted glass bottle, the liquor beginning to lap pleasantly at my brain, when I realized that it was a familiar shape I was tracing. At the same moment, from across the room my buddy Brian laughed aloud: “Dude, it´s an old Johnnie Walker bottle.” With a combined three years experience in the northern sierra, there´s no reason that this should have surprised us, but I had to laugh along with him. Here we were, passing around a bottle of specialty, home-distilled Peruvian mountain liquor, all conversing in the same hillbilly mountain Spanish, miles away – both in physical distance and in our minds – from all things American…and in barges Johnnie, shaking up the whole scene, conjuring a memory and an unwelcome dose of relativity that had been completely absent a few seconds ago. That bastard. But like I said, by this time I was feeling pretty thoughtful…

Brian is a community health volunteer nearing the 2-year finish line; he and his town´s JASS, or local drinking water committee, had come up to Chalaco from several hours away in another mountain valley to see what they could learn from the work my “counterpart” Miguel and I had been doing in the towns and villages of Chalaco for the last several months. It had been a successful couple days, despite us all having arrived exhausted. They had had to set out from their town of Jililí in the pre-dawn darkness because of a problem with the road, only to turn around in Piura six hours later and come back up a near-parallel route, arriving in time for a late dinner in Chalaco. For my part, I had spent two of the last three nights on overnight busses going to and from Lima for a day and a half of workshops with the new Wat/San volunteers. The fact that we all arrived as planned was noteworthy in and of itself. The following day had been spent out in the field inspecting rural water systems and discussing the finer points of chlorine treatment, water use and misuse, and the various frustrations offered by the often thankless job of water work. After the meeting I had organized that afternoon with some local authorities, my friend and the head of the local health commission invited us all down to his house for some after-dinner tragos. The term refers to any drink harder than beer, which up here means it´s generally synonymous with sugarcane cañazo, straight up so you can really appreciate the kerosene-esque aroma, or heated up in a pot and mixed with any number of flavors, from lime juice to Coca-Cola to milk. So it would be a nice surprise when this night offered a new, much more interesting variation.

Once inside Jesús´s house and seated in the typical drinking circle, our host brought out a bottle of what looked like Mint Listerene, and wound up tasting not all that unlike it. I tend to be a little wary of consuming anything that brightly-colored, especially alcohol, but after a few half-shots I realized it wasn´t bad at all, and an hour later we started in on an anis-flavored version of the same liquor. By the time bottle number three (orange-flavored, with a color that looked like highlighter juice) was procured, our curiosity about the drinks had been satisfied: turns out Jesús´s brother and neighbor Eduard (also a former Chalaco mayor, as I found out) had started experimenting with distilled cañazo a few years back, and had recently acquired the health certification he needed to sell to the general public. All his 40-50 proof liquors are made with extra-distilled sugarcane liquor and then naturally flavored with the mint leaves, anis plants, and oranges he buys by the 50-kilo sack-full. The color was pretty unnatural-looking, but in defense of the entrepreneur, shiny objects do tend to attract attention.

I guess I´m not the first to sit back and watch “social lubrication” in action, but it was really funny to sit there as the hours – and bottles – passed, and watch the mood escalate from reserved at first, then to polite, to jovial, to boisterous, to straight-up LOUD at its peak, and then slide back down the other, quieter side; thoughtful, then sentimental, and finally downright sloppy by the time 2AM rolled around and our guests´ bus was waiting for them. Throughout the day the atmosphere had been friendly but professional, but by the night´s end all formalities (and Peruvians can be very formal people, especially around strangers) had gone out the window.

We had passed the peak of dirty jokes and embarrassing stories (also discussing everything from the Iraq war to the idiots who had tried to rob a store a few days before in Chalaco), and were starting to fade into the phase of contented contemplation, when the master himself came in from next door with a few unmarked, half-empty bottles of colorless liquor in hand. After a shower of praise from all sides, Eduard, short, about sixty with a graying comb-over, and quick with a wrinkle-inducing smile, sat down and invited us to taste some of his current “experiments.” These, as it turned out, would include some of the most delicious liquors I´d ever tasted. I knew it was good stuff right off the bat when Brian, seated across the circle from me, took a sip, sucked his teeth, frowned, inhaled, forcefully exhaled, coughed, smiled, and said aloud in English, “Wow. That´s some good sh--!” The bottles contained, in the order that we tasted them (and then emptied them), an orange brandy, a lucuma wine, and a lucuma brandy. (Lucuma is unlike any other fruit I´ve ever seen – it´s about the size of a grapefruit, grows in trees like an apple, and has a texture somewhere in-between banana and chalk. I won´t even try to describe the taste…but it´s real tasty). These were obviously Eduard´s most prized creations: pungent in smell, clear in color, and packing a real burn. But each one had a distinct flavor and smoothness about it – even if he hadn´t detailed all his efforts, it was obvious that Eduard had spent the better part of several years perfecting his products. The lucuma brandy (around 80 proof he thinks, about as strong as an American bourbon) was the crowd favorite.

In addition to the discovery of these amazing mystery liquors, I had another first that night: seeing Miguel drunk. He´s a pretty stocky guy, and I was surprised that the liquor seemed to affect him much more than the rest of us. It was the first time in almost a year of daily interactions that I´ve seen him talk about the difficulties – and consequences – of his relentless work ethic. This is something I´d wondered about since the beginning; how the district health inspector, water and sanitation expert, and ambulance driver (among various other hats he wears) can possibly be on the clock (at least) six days a week and still manage to maintain any kind of personal life, especially with two teenage girls at home, not to mention his lovely wife Amanda. At one point, when the hard stuff ran dry and with less than an hour to kill, at his insistence he and I went out to buy some beers to share with our guests. I offered to buy, and was surprised when he let me. In between repeated knocks on the door of a darkened home/bodega where we thought we might find what we wanted, he confessed to me that today had been his oldest daughter´s seventeenth birthday – and that he had had to miss the humble celebration (he couldn´t afford much) to be out in the field with us. So minutes later, with one arm draped around someone he had met for the first time just that morning, his slurred description of himself as an unappreciated “firefighter” could have come off as conceited and obnoxious. But to me, truer words were never spoken. I felt relieved, somehow.

Brian and his JASS ended up just making the bus, having first made plans for a return trip in December by a team from Chalaco to check out their water system and help implement the changes we had talked about. Who knows, maybe they´ve got some surprises up their sleeve, too.