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The Fist of God -- Page 7
THE NEXT MORNING was the festival's last; truck and bus drivers lined up in the plaza, calling out their destinations. When they had the requisite overload, they heaved into motion, jamming Saúl's street and filling the tinku plaza with a gridlock of idling engines and diesel fumes. It took hours to inch our way out of town. Yesterday's winners were loitering about, looking hopeful, but the chicha had given us bellyaches, and it was time to go.

As the Nissan lurched toward the pastry shops of Cochabamba, I considered all the worlds we'd traveled in and out of in this one small place, San Pedro. And the moment when I'd gone as far as I could go, and knew I wanted to turn back.

On the first day of the tinku, I'd gotten up the courage to approach a women's fight. A young campesina in a red cardigan was winning, grabbing two fistfuls of her opponent's hair and slowly, slowly—enduring an identical grip on her own hair—shoving her enemy face-down into the dirt. She stood panting, fiercely victorious, in a tight, deep ring of delighted onlookers.

I pressed closer, trying to see. Suddenly, the campesina spotted me through the crowd and began screeching in Quechua. From a stream of insults, I picked out the Hispanicized putay, "whore."

Who, me? Her black eyes drilled into mine, glittering unmistakably. By the unwritten rules of ritual battle, we were appropriate opponents: from different communities yet of the same sex, approximate age, size, and degree of intoxication.

I ducked and turned, taking cover in the human jam. As if through a mass of cotton I heard everybody laughing. The campesina berated me louder, clearly enjoying herself.

"She has won," a bystander informed me. And then, luckily, everyone was distracted by a sound like baseball bats hitting sacks of grain. New fight. Men.

For hours I chided myself. I'd failed to defend the honor of the United States against that of northern Potosí. I should have poked that woman in the eye! How dare she call me a whore?

But no, it would have been intrusive, obscene. The following afternoon, I saw my enemy again. She still wore her red cardigan, but she wasn't gloating now. Weeping drunkenly, she struggled with two young men who gripped her arms as they steered her down a slope littered with old plastic bags and human turds.

Weeks later, I was dismayed when a sociologist in La Paz told me that they could have been dragging her off to rape her. He'd visited San Pedro many times and was a confidant of Joél's brother, Samuel Murillo. Gang rapes were common at the tinku, he said. Though all tinku rumors can be inflated, I easily found an eyewitness to an attempted gang rape at another tinku. Clearly a tinku's sexual aspects cover the same range as the fighting—from terror to beauty, from brutality to entertainment. I'd experienced some of that range myself, from Saúl's flirtations to the taunts that followed my skirt—and to the excruciating drunk in a chichería who had lifted my skirt, talked filth in Quechua, and grabbed my hands hard, bringing me to tears of rage and pain. No one stopped him; David and Wolf were not around. I berated him in Spanish, and he'd laughed and crushed my hands, saying that gringos had no respect, until he decided, all on his own, to head for the bathroom, to puke and pass out.

Tinku had been appalling all along. The bloody teeth, the piss-slick alleyways, the damage and the posturing. Yet its ugliness proved how real it was, real beyond measure, beyond imagining. And for that, I loved it. Weeks later, at another tinku, I'd hear the particular silence that came when a man fell and did not get up. I bent over him, thinking to use my rusty EMT skills, but his wife cursed me away. Ten minutes later, he was still unconscious; I left, ashamed. What was I doing here?

I cannot forget the campesina, she who was willing to be my enemy. I'd used everything I knew to reach the frontier between our worlds. Of course, if I'd been from one of those villages, I'd have taken her up on her challenge. I'd have gained some injury or scar, surely, but I might also have a permanent friend. I can still feel her eyes burning, like the lightning, through all the distances between us.

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