He popped his head out of the gray cement rectangle that held the showers and bathrooms.  “I’ll be right with you folks”.  Marieke and I sat down on the rickety bench in front of the house.  We’d stopped here because we needed water and this was, supposedly, the only store in the area.  It didn’t look like much.  Most of the building was half-finished; raw cement, empty holes where windows should have been, wires dangling here and there from open sockets and light fixtures.  But there it sat, almost as if anticipating something, right there on the steep-sided shore of the Santa River.

The man stepped out of the shower area, which was separated about 30 feet from the house.  He wore no shirt, his towel slung over one brown shoulder, baggy pants cinched against his hips.  I studied him as he made his way toward us.  He was thin.  Too thin.  Death-is-coming-soon thin.  Sunken cheeks, hollow eye sockets, the skin on his torso hanging off his bones like wrinkly tan cloth.  His shoulder blades stuck out like proto-wings.  I could clearly see the outlines of the radius and ulna bones in his forearms.  his stomach was tucked up against his spine it seemed, his ribcage like an overhanging pile of sticks.  Something was eating him up, from the inside out.  How old was he?  50?  60? 80?  It was hard to tell.

He smiled a skull-smile at us.  Friendly.  Expecting.  “Welcome, welcome.  Excuse the wait, youngsters, you caught me right at shower time.”  He fumbled a key into the door, opened it and motioned us to step in.  This was the store.  A tiny room.  An ancient refrigerator knocked and pinged to the left of the door, a single bed huddled to the right of it.  Behind the worn blue counter, a few shelves held a handful of dusty products: toilet paper, pasta, bottles of cane liquor…a one stop shopping center for three essentials in life. 

All the while, Don Coco kept up a conversation, “Riding bikes?  No?  Walking?  Well, that’s healthy, isn’t it?  You must be tired.  Oh, water?  Yes.  Cold or room temperature?  Cold?  Just a moment, right over here.”  He opened the old fridge.  Two or three bottles of water, a lone coca cola, and a fanta lay on separate shelves, as if in some little bottle morturary, awaiting internment.

“You must be tired” He continued.  “You’re more than welcome to spend the night here, you can set up your tent right by the house here.  You can shower.  I’ve had several travelers like yourselves stay here.  They’ve always loved it.  I’m building a restaurant here, bit by bit.  It’s going to be busy around here once they pave the road.  I just love to have folks like you stop by.  Swiss, Dutch, German, American, they’ve all come here on bikes or in cars.  They always love it.  Most nights, I invite some of the other folks from the village to watch movies here.  That’s right, a brand new DVD player, nice TV.  I’m the only one here who has electricity, you see.  I bought the wire myself and ran it the three kilometers from the main poles to the house here.  Take a look.  Right up there.” 

We stepped outside to have a look at his electrical handwork.  Two feeble wires ran from the house to a crooked tree-turned-power-pole, and from there up a hill and out of sight.  The wires looked like they were spliced at least five times, just from the pole to the house…I’m sure any safety inspector from the States would have had a small coronary upon seeing them.  But they were working, making this house the only one in the area to be within spitting distance of the 21st century.

Mar and I really hadn’t walked very far that day, and there was still plenty of daylight.  But all we had to do was share one look and it was decided, “What the hell. We’ll stay…and there’s a shower!” 

I turned to him “Well, sir, if it’s not too much of a bother, I think we’ll take you up on the offer.  We’ll stay.”  The man beamed, stuck out one of those bony hands to shake ours.  “Don Coco, they call me around here, haha.  Been called that for so long that I’ve almost forgotten my real name.”

Marieke made a beeline for the showers while I busied myself with setting up the tent.  After awhile she came out, a huge it’s-so-nice-to-be-clean-again grin on her face.  Don Coco, who was standing near me said softly, maybe to me, “Well, isn’t she beautiful.”  Not long after, I was in the shower.  The water was sun-warmed, nothing more, but it felt like heaven on my five-days-dirty body.  As I was drying off, I glanced up to the darkening evening sky, a pale moon was standing right over me, a glowing period at the end of another day’s sentence.

As Mar and I ate our usual stew-like meal, Don Coco spoke to us of this tiny village and it’s suffering.  “Mirador, Overlook, that’s what this place used to be called because all you had to do was turn and look across the river there, and you’re breath would be taken away by the sight of cherry and apple blossoms, avacado and lúcuma trees, strawberry fields, orange trees, banana plants.  Oh, the fruit we grew!” he stopped and sighed.  “Field after field of fruit orchards from here all the way up to the bend in the river.  And people used to come from all over just to see them, just to look out over all of it.  Of course, they’d also pack a lot of fresh fruit home, too.” he chuckled.  “You see, this road didn’t used to be here.  It’s built on top of old train tracks.  That was the only way to get up to these parts.  It went all the way up to Huallanca and the dam.  Every weekend, the train would pull up right here, people crammed into every space, people on the roof, people hanging off the sides and back.  We made a killing selling our fruit…best fruit in the whole province.”  He sighed again, a bit wistfully. “How I loved riding that train, absolutely beautiful, sitting there, following the river down to Chimbote and the ocean.” 

“What happened?” I asked “I mean, where’re the orchards and the trains and the people now?”

“The quake” he said, shaking his head.  “The 1970 quake, the one that buried that town up thataway,” (he meant Yungay, a decent-sized town that was buried under 40 feet of mud, ice and rock as a result of the quake) “the one that started a huge flood here, destroyed the train tracks, broke the roots of the trees, carried away topsoil, ruined the irrigation canals.”  He walked over to the edge of the steep slope that led to the river.  We followed him.   “All that empty land there” he said, pointing to the flats on the other side of the river, everything gray now in the failing light.  “That was all ours.  My mother and father had wonderful orchards, back then.  My mother, in particular loved them, called them her ‘garden’, worked in them every day, even Sundays.  But the quake, it ended all that.  In one day…one day.”  His voice carried a tone of utter disbelief, as if he were still unable to grasp how his life could have changed so drastically, so suddenly. 

“She died because of it, you know.  My mother.  After the quake she just went to bed.  Two years she spent like that, almost never getting up.  And one day, she died…  Se murió de pena” he almost whispered it, putting his hands against one cheek in that universal symbol of sleep  ”She died of grief.  That quake killed her.  She couldn’t bear to watch her plants, her garden, wither away.”

This old, too-thin man, standing there now, so kind, gentle and fragile, he looked to me like a wiry 1970 kid, watching a still-swollen river that had once brought him so many dreams, and then swept them away in one furious moment.  I watched this oldman-child facing it all, wondering why and why…while behind him, in a modest mud-brick home, his mother slowly removed her blouse and skirt, pulled off her shoes, slipped under the heavy blankets, curled up into a pain-filled little ball in her bed, too sad to live.