The bunkers of Vilcabamba

Vilcabamba, 5000 inhabitants, was once ‘discovered’ as a miraculous site where people live almost forever. An international centre for gerontology was promptly established, the special properties of the air, soil, light, water, food and lifestyle feverishly studied (we all know how desperately the bourgeois wants to live forever). It didn’t take long until vigilant US citizens, the gringos, forever scrutinizing their pet countries in South America, found out about this. And soon they were coming over in their drones, hungry for the specialness of being a white foreigner, for adventure, for immortality and, indeed, for profit-making.

In the past 5 years, the area saw several waves of colonizers settling in, Ecuador was placed in the top 5 of ‘best places to retire’ and Vilcabamba acquired the fame of being run over by gringos. They opened cafes, sport bars with baseball themes, yoga and meditation centres, various ‘we save the world (for the future enjoyment of our children)’ associations, restaurants, hostels and new age spas, baked their vile cookies and brewed their insipid coffee. Today you can see them gathered in bunches at the 2 or 3 designated cafes and bars around the main plaza, loud and brash and tribal as you might imagine, holding court, coming back in their jeeps from tennis, debating ineptly the financial crisis backed up by figures memorized from yahoo news, hailing the Ecuadorian waiters in thick accents or straight in American, discussing money, discussing investments, discussing profit, discussing who has one over the other, some wearing cowboy costumes or pseudo-ethnic garbs to drive the point home. Some plan a secessionist coup that would found the ‘Independent Republic of Vilcabamba’.

But this is only the surface. Talking to locals we found out more: the gringo colonizers own most of the land around Vilcambamaba: in classical primitive accumulation spirit, the first ones that came over in search of the simple life bought huge chunks, which they proceeded to chop up and sell at inflated prices to the later arrivals. Most affirm to be disgusted by the USA and be at home in Vilcabamba, while complaining incessantly about the backwardness of the place and people. They bargain for everything: one of them started waving the $15 she was willing to pay for a silver jewellery priced $30 in the shop, a piece she was apparently buying for ‘someone really special’, asking the artisan: “Don’t you need this money? Don’t your children need it?” Another imported Carrara marble for her drive-in; yet another invested the money from land speculation into about 10kg gold just before kicking the bucket; a determinately New Agey one asked a local artist to procure her large, rock-sized pieces of quartz crystal with which she wanted to build a walkway from her fence to her house that would purify all her guests of bad vibes.

And they are paranoid, some with schizophrenic colourings. One thinks the area is invaded by reptilians, CIA mutants that will destroy them all, and rants about it to whoever might listen, scaring the local children. Another is obsessed with conspiracy theories and, while in Lima, planned to hire a helicopter to escape the tsunami wave that was inevitably going to flood the city (the tsunami wave did hit the coast of Peru, 2 hours drive from the capital, in the form of a 45cm wave). Another liquidated all her assets and fled the area before the radioactive cloud from Japan would kill everyone. A group of them allegedly spent $70,000 on food (how many tons of rice?) to be stocked in their underground bunker, as preparation for the 2012 Armageddon; we were told that the local rats are growing fatter by the day. It seems that under the massive villas with incorporated elevators and swimming pools these simplicity-seekers built themselves in the hills there is an impressive number of bunkers. Just before January 2000, a Cuban-American/Real-American couple stocked such a bunker and sealed themselves inside, to await peacefully the predicted end of the civilized world; they emerged in March, pale, half-blind, malnourished, depressed and haggard after the sensorial deprivation, to explore the fuming ruins of humanity. The local expat community billboard proposes holidays in the “Bunker meditation retreat”, “How to Survive Sexual Boredom: A Guide for Survivalists” and “Beyond Scurvy: A Manual for Healthy Eating in the Post-Apocalypse World”.

In the meantime, an Uruguayan old-age researcher left the city in disgust after just one night, claiming that the large numbers of decrepit Americans dragging themselves around the main plaza give a really bad vibe; the travellers in search of a more authentic authenticity started avoiding the place; life expectancy in the area dropped to average standards; and the locals are growing increasingly irritated with the ongoing immigration. We expect a slump in anti-atomic bunker prices to hit the ‘valley of longevity’ sometime during the next fiscal year.
                                                                                               tchuss-tchuss,
                                                                                                          la mordue

Fear and gorging in Zaruma

Another botched gig opportunity. The setting is a little prosperous colonial mining town in the Ecuadorian mountains – the tourists it attracts and the ensuing cosmopolitan atmosphere reigning among the 400 inhabitants made it a worthy option.

The Pill is also keen to visit a mine, lured by the glow of gold – the superficial old layers are just for tourists, deeper down the extraction still goes on – but the other diabolikal diagonal lies slumped in the room, sweating profusely under the faux ceiling of polystyrene, the panels sealed with gaffer tape to keep some grainy substance from falling on the bodies of the sleeping guests, between pink plastered walls whose corroded lower parts give a peek both at the wooden structure underneath and the previous color schemes of the space. He is sweating both because he seems to be sick, and because the wall against which the bed is wedged is hot. A gold brocarde curtain tries both to elevate the status of the room and to hide the merciless sun that beats on the wall, but the light manages to shine through it as if it were a flimsy piece of cloth, and at the corners, where the brocarde does not touch the edges of the window, the sun comes through shaped like blades that stab at whatever is exposed to them.

The Pill is trying to help him out by recapitulating the greasy, stodgy, nauseating foods they’ve had over the last couple of days, which involved many, many hours on shabby buses cruising through landscapes of banana and cocoa plantations, tropical forests with crystalline rivers, mountain villages surrounded by lakes, pastures and more lush rainforests. The order of chicken and 4 side-dishes the Pill picked in a dusty little town on a half hour break between two buses is evoked, a meal meant for 2 but which could have gorged at least 4 people. The two of them had fought to ingest and digest, for what seemed endless rounds, the huge pieces of meat, the fried plantain in both its ‘verde’ and ‘maduro’ forms, all oozing oil. The huge tub of dry rice. The mound of French fries sweating in the polystyrene container, leaking oil too. And the two tubs of thick soup, one based on beans, the other congealing around pieces of chicken feet and necks. The feast proved to be painful from the beginning, even before being processed by the gastric system. The soups were hot and burned tongues and fingers, then were spilled on both laps, where they left colourful odorous marks. As the bus lurched and swayed on the mountain roads, The Diagonikals tried to reduce the number of tubs on their knees, but as much as they swallowed there were still too many of them, stuffed with both liquid and solid ingredients that refused to diminish their volume. As the Pill tried to chop up the chicken into smaller parts, with the plastic knife provided by the ‘Chicken Town’ employee that had prepared her order, she kept on losing her grip on the useless greasy utensil, smearing even larger surfaces of the plastic bag that acted as a plate and skidding onto the surrounding clothing. Her fingers covered in sauce and grease would every now and then point to the paradise landscapes they were crossing, spectacular mountains on which fog was rolling down in thick bales, sunny mountain peaks, green valleys in which happy cows were grazing. Then they would both re-submit themselves to the calvary of the food in front of them. The hefty remains of the chicken and of its robust companions were finally allowed to rest in peace, after one last session of feeding, divided in a few bags that got shoved in the corner of the room, out of sight. But their legacy is alive in the diabolikal’s guts. The Pill hoped that her evoking of the slippery, stomach-churning food would make the diabolikal release some of it, but his oesophageal sphincter resisted.

As the hours pass, it becomes obvious he is in no shape to perform. The Pill swipes his humid forehead and goes out to take some photos of the charming wooden architecture of the town, including the main plaza with its delightful gold-painted priapic baby statue pissing fresh water and the pulp-fiction/heroic fantasy/metal album cover/soft porn illustrations of the old testament adorning the nave of the local church.
Ta-ta, Primrose Pill