Lima, in its raw self, is not obviously, nor immediately, beautiful. Its skin is perfumed of an intoxicating combination of freshly chopped chicken heads, sticky gasoline, and briny ocean waves. The scent lingers within your nose acting as an invisible guest overstaying its welcome, until you forget it’s still even there.
During the winter, as it was, the sky is often as starkly white as this page I type upon, blank yet promising. There is something romantically inspiring about a sky without clouds or color. It forces the viewer to tilt their head upward and consider for a moment, with this blank slate, how endless are the ways this sky could be imagined? I found such comfort in Lima’s sky. When the sensory overload of vibrant and confused images became overwhelming, as they sometimes did, the sky’s enveloping emptiness cleansed me, renewing and refreshing my tired eyes. Lima taught me a new perspective on what it means to see or, rather, to witness.
Intertwining visions of violence unsettled me, but I am morbidly indebted to these carved-in images. I’d like to talk about one in particular.
One Saturday, on our bus ride headed to paint a collective mural, and after many feverish and sleep-deprived days prior to this morning, I thought I might have been seeing things, again. With my head resting against the icy window, I recognized this would be an ideal opportunity to catch up on sleep, but I could not resist gazing out towards Lima’s outer edges, admiring the even lesser beautiful, the more dangerous, and certainly the most interesting. What I was about to see still lives with me now, even more potently than the city’s prickly scent.
Admittedly, the past week while experiencing the most intense and full-bodied sickness I had ever encountered, my vision had been undoubtedly distorted. You could say, as I mentioned earlier, I was “seeing things.” I was living in a hybrid reality, straddling between vividly imaginative sights that I may or may not have created, imbedded with a darkly twisted series of smoldering hallucinations. But while I question much of what was going on with my vision during this time, I know that I saw clearly in this specific moment.
For lack of knowing a more appropriate term to reference, I can only describe this scene as an “interspecies gang bang.” A half-circle of men stood penetratingly mesmerized by a dog, in the center, ferociously fucking what looked to me as a nearly dead, or perhaps actually dead, female dog. The human men, doing nothing to intervene, watched without dropped jaws or lifted brows or widened eyes. Maybe they had seen this before. One inched closer to the center to get a better look.
Before I knew it, the bus continued to drive away and this scene became an increasingly smaller configuring of figures and motions. I turned back to look, but within a few seconds what I had just seen so explicitly transformed into a distant speck. You’d think I would have immediately told everyone on the bus, or at least my professors, but, not too different than those men, I too had nothing to say. Shattering swings of sadness and helplessness often debilitated me, and I had to, once again, protect myself from these repeated heartbreaks by removing myself from the situation. I might have had a tear in my right eye (that one typically gets more watery than the left), but if I did, it wasn’t shed, and even then, I can’t remember if it was there or not.
Besides the obviousness of being horrified by witnessing brutal violence, this scene particularly struck me because I had already spent the past six weeks thinking intensely about rape, and other invading encounters, and how these moments un-consentingly transform the mind, spirit, and essence of an affected body. These bodies must continually adopt new realities based on escapism, moving out of their selves, seeking comfort and asylum in more hospitable spaces, if those can be found. In Lima, and in my travels elsewhere after the program ended, I had to un-learn my habitual tendency to be a detached ghostly figure hiding from unresolved, repressed memories of violence. Lima did not hide its ugly perimeters from me, and that is exactly what I needed. Witnessing explicit violence, realizing it is real and not imagined, that it happened and it happens, gave me the opportunity to try to start loving myself, to move away from shame and discomfort, and to full-sensorially feel exactly what I was feeling.
I, like Lima, am not uniquely, nor immediately beautiful or broken, especially from a distance, from the perimeters. But when you move in closer, you become witness to a whole other spectrum of events. Because when Lima’s sky is so bluntly white, the buildings and streets contrast with brilliantly heightened color, and when the sounds of car alarms endlessly ringing harmonize with a street performer playing the Cajon, it becomes the most lovely song, and when your smelly house guest is blown out of your nose, you begin to fondly miss it. When I sincerely opened my senses to all the possibilities of Lima, not letting fear or anxiety create limitations, I came to love it, and in parallel, love myself.
I still frequently think about that dog and those men and that speck, but while I am horrified and frustrated and fed up, I do not wish to un-see it. It was absolutely perfect for me to witness it and to be in Peru in that exact moment and within those whole two months, because, after experiencing my own and empathizing others’ external and internal violence in extreme and destructive ways, after continuous debilitations limiting my ability to care or feel anything at all, and after embodying countless phantasmal travels away from my body, I decided to return to it, and to call it home.
Haley Bosco Doyle is a fanatic of colorful patterns, white-tailed deer, and 1960s karaoke. Despite her parents’ wishes, she studies the intersections between mental health and artistic expression. She recently returned from an intensely thought-provoking CHID study abroad to Lima, Peru.
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