March 26, 2012 – Mate with Matt
A Brit, an American, and a calabash gourd walk into a park. Sounds
like the start to a great joke only I don’t know what the punch line is. I’m
thinking about this as I take a bus into Miraflores and hotfoot it over the
tree Matt and I have set up as our meeting spot in Parque Kennedy. I’m about thirty
minutes late. It’s partially my fault, leaving the apartment seven minutes
later than I’d planned, and partially Lima’s transit system’s fault, I’d waited
curbside for at least fifteen minutes before one of the three combis I can take into town drives by. I
flag it down. The bus is crowded and the Cobrador tells me to take the front
seat. The man inside gets out and lets me climb up into the middle seat and
then he gets back in next to me. I twist over so that my knees are out of the
way of the driver and the gearshift and settle in for the twenty minute ride.
The air sifts in through the open window. It feels nice against my face. I’ve
been off my routine for about a week while Matt was staying at the apartment
and I’m feeling pressure from my self-imposed need to do things. The last few
days I’ve been frantically achieving and scratching things off my To Do list
and then turning right around to add more to the mix. I need to chill out. To
be. To slow up and remember to breathe. A half day off will give my thoughts
time to settle, the story ideas I’ve got drowning in my head time to surface,
and my OCD tendencies a Time Out. 
I glance up and down the park making sure I haven’t missed
Matt. He’d introduced me to mate (pronounce mah-teh) while he crashed at the
apartment for a few days. He’d shown me how to dump the yerba mate leaves into
the gourd and shake them up, add a touch of cool water to soak the flavor out, and
how to set the bombilla—the silver straw
that acts as a sieve and straw—just at the right angle. He’d made several trips
to bring out the thermos of hot water, the extra herbs, and the bag of yerba
mate in case we needed to strengthen the mix as we drank. We’d taken our chairs
out on the patio and sat with our feet up on the balcony edge.
We passed the calabash gourd back and forth. When we drained
the water, Matt added more. When the thermos was empty he went back inside to
refill it from our water boiler.
We sat there for hours, drinking tea and sharing life
stories. We talked about wicked men, patriarchal cultures, injustice, pain,
love, choice, obtaining visas, jobs, Lori Berenson, ideals, books and language.
Fictional characters took residence in my head while we talked. I jotted some
notes in my book so I wouldn’t forget. Inspiration is always an unexpected and
welcome gift.
I’m making a slow round on the sidewalk near the tree when I
hear my name. Matt approaches. He has his mate bag slung over a shoulder and a
2 liter jug filled with hot water in his hand.
We make the usual greetings; forgiving and apologizing for
being late. The park is busy. All the benches taken. We find a spot on a curb
in front of a tree while we wait for a bench to free up.
“I wanted to be closer to the cats. I wanted to get a bench,”
Matt says mournfully. There’s a clowder of cats that live in this area—fed by
tourists and loving citizens. Matt calls it the Cat Park and he points the cats
out to me as they mill about. He loves them. One dark cat darts in front of us
with a dog in hot pursuit. The cat claws up a tree and I know it’s thumbing its
nose at the dog.
Cats.
Matt sifts the mate into the calabash gourd and shakes the
leaves. He adds in a pinch of the extra herbs.
 |
| Matt and the Fortuneteller |
Vigilant, Matt sees a couple leave their bench. “Quick,” he
says. “Go save the bench and I’ll bring everything over.”
I hop it over and save the spot for us.
We settle in.
“You don’t talk much,” Matt says, arranging all our mate paraphernalia
on the bench beside him. “You’re going to talk for a while now.”
I do have something on my mind. “I was thinking about something
you said the other day,” I say. We’d talked about physical and psychological pain
and I’d been pushed on to think about people who cut themselves as a way to
cope with the pain in their life. Or the ones who cut tiny lines over their
skin in order to feel real again, to bring them back into reality from the
disembodied existence they live within for whatever reason. I’m fascinated by
what drives us to do what we do, why we are the way we are, and if, and how, we
can change. I’d been thinking about this for days. Why would someone cut? How
do we deal with pain? How do I deal with pain? There’s a female character
taking form in my brain. She’s gathering strength to whisper her story into my
ear. But she’s still phantasmal. I’ve enjoyed my conversations with Matt. We both
have different perspectives, but we can discuss things from our own spheres.
Like some conversational Venn diagram where we approach our talks from our own
mental processes and somewhere it overlaps. Matt’s interests pivot around
political, social, cultural and personal instances that relate back to values—ideas
he’s cementing to put into the book he will write as an aid to the Green Party.
My interests are in human relationships,
the way we are, fiction, and psychology (to name a few).
I find our talks absorbing, interesting. 
“I was thinking about pain,” I continue. “And how sometimes
a person will create physical pain when their emotional pain starts to build up
to a certain level. Like someone who cuts. They cut so that the pain of the cut
will distract or take them away from the emotional pain. It’s their way to
cope.”
Before he has a chance to comment, a Peruvian man totters
over to us. “Can I have a seat? I just need to sit down,” he tells us in
Spanish. He waves at the jug and the bag taking up space. Matt moves everything
down to the ground. I scoot over and we make room for this man.
“I’m sorry to bother you. Sorry to bother you, señorita,”
he says. He’s missing a couple teeth and his words are hard to follow, slurred
and rough. “I have to take my medications. They cost a lot of money. If I don’t
take them, I hear voices in my head. The voices started after the time I was in
the army. Sometimes I feel they’re chasing me.” Matt and I can both tell this
guy is truly tormented. “I just need a little money so I can buy my
medications. Just a little tiny bit of money so I can buy some lunch, buy some
medicine.”
I’m thinking it’s ironic that this man, with these problems
would sit next to us to ask for money just after I started a conversation about
psychological and emotional pain. I’m not heartless, I’m really not, but I know
if I give him what I have then I won’t be able to pay my bus fare home. I don’t
have uncontrollable voices in my head, but I also don’t have much to offer
monetarily. I feel awful at this, my fierce stinginess. Guilt is another topic
for another day.
Matt reaches into his pants pocket and pulls out all the
change he has. “I’m sorry,” he tells the man. “I don’t have very much.” He
slips the money into the man’s hand. The man’s face brightens. He looks at the
wealth. “Look at all this money!” he says under his breath. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Señorita, for letting me take up your
time. Thank you.” He pulls himself up. As he leaves I watch him with my heart
breaking for the pain in the world.
“I wish I had more to give him,” Matt says.
I let out a soft whiff of air. “He said, ‘Look at all this
money.’” I shake my head. “You gave him a lot. To him, that was a lot of money.
More than he was expecting.”
“It was maybe three soles,” Matt says. Three soles being
just over one U.S. dollar. And that, from one begged at “tourist”, is a
fortune. What a world, yeah?
Left to ourselves again, I don’t know if I want to take my
thread of thought back up. The contrast of my thinking and the reality of pain
is so very real in the moment. I take the gourd when Matt offers it to me, take
small sips and empty out the water before I hand it back. Mate is an
Argentinian custom. From underneath my eyebrows, I watch the curious,
suspicious, judging, and even accepting glances from the passerbys. Several men
say, “Buena mate,” as they walk past. A mulleted guy and his girl give us
appraising looks.
“They’re definitely Argentinian,” Matt says. “The mullet is
a dead giveaway.”
A trio of English speaking tourists asks if we’d mind taking
their photo. I stand to take the picture, and one of the ladies leans in at Matt.
“Is that a hookah?” she asks.
He sets her straight about mate, I take the photos and we
shoo them on.
Matt and I speak the same language, more or less. We have
more cultural similarities to each other than we do to South America. But there
are still differences. Judgments. He has
a very sarcastic wit at times. I have long stretches of silence. He doesn’t
spare insults even as he acts under, what he says is the very British tradition
of sorry, sorry, so sorry. I don’t rein in my thoughts or hesitate to take
notes when I want to remember something for later—when I want to remember something
to write about it later. 
We’re talking about money versus need, trading versus
gaining and profit, and social change. I take a breath, wanting to draw a picture
about how Americans think about money or something. I have a point, a
comparison, a way in which to give understanding for one mentality.
“Americans think,” I start.
“I don’t care about fucking Americans,” Matt interrupts with
an intensity in his tone, and he continues without letting me cut in.
I’m surprised at my anger; it boils up quick in response. I’m
not every American. And every American isn’t me. But this dismissal hits a
little like a sucker punch to the gut. Because I am American. I’m not sure I
need him to care about me, but there’s a ferocity in his words that cuts me off—locks
me out. I raise my eyebrows and shut my mouth. I do love some of the ideals
America espouses. I hate the ignorance that we get judged for so often. I love
the tenacity. I despise the arrogance. We’re not perfect, but hearing the
differences, comparing, contrasting, accepting--this, I feel, leads to
understanding and potentially to change. I fume next to him on the bench.
Marvel at this dark emotion that I don’t often experience, surprised at how I bristle
at the insult. I keep silent and only half listen to him while I try to
understand myself.
When he’s done, with a bit of apology in his voice he says, “What
do the Americans think?”
“I might have lost the thread of it after you said you didn’t
care,” I say. I shrug. My anger is gone. I think back to the place where my
mind had been. I recapture the comparison I’d wanted to speak out. This time he
listens.
We sit there and talk and drink mate.
There we are, two people from two different countries
sitting side by side in Peru while practicing an Argentinian tradition. This is
what living is. Being all people and nobody at all. Holding to a place and relating
to people as humans, to humans as people.
When we’ve exhausted the hot water, we pack up.
“I might have some time Tuesday morning before I head out of
town,” Matt says. “We could have mate in the park then if you’re free.”
“Sounds good,” I say, waving goodbye as I go to find the
corner where my bus will be, “let me know. See you later.”
The bus isn’t as full on the way home. I settle into my
seat, pay my fare, and think about emotions, pain, and about what it means to
be human. 
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