The Life of an American in Lima: Part 6, the handkerchief

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At this point, I don't think much surprises me anymore. So when someone tells me they saw me the other day walking in a neighborhood that's not my own, my usual response is, "Oh really? Why didn't you say hello?" The answer never quite makes complete sense to me, but I guess the point is that the person saw me and now they're telling me, and that's all that's needed.

The owner of the second apartment I rented here in Lima was the first to explain that Lima es un pañuelo, it's a handkerchief, with all the people mixed up inside. So when you come to Lima and stay for awhile, just expect that you'll be spotted at least once a week. Which means, don't do anything you don't want to be seen. Because someone's inevitably going to see you.

Case in point, I found two separate blogs, here and here, that explain the Lima-es-un-pañuelo phenomenon. I think the first blog even describes how the author ran into an acquaintance who was now dating his ex and then hurried to his office to search for the person on Facebook to confirm it was who he thought it was. Hilarious!

I have a friend that seems to always spot her other friends' husbands cheating. I don't know how or why, but she's told me so many stories of seeing so-and-so with someone who is not his wife at the grocery store or a restaurant or something like that. And eventually the wives find out, but my friend already knew, and probably a lot of other people did, too.

This very thing happened to me today, which is why I'm even thinking about this.

I ran into a former student this afternoon at work. We hadn't seen each other in a couple months, so we were just catching up, but as I was about to kiss him goodbye, something sparked his memory.

He remembered he had seen me before Christmas walking with someone, my "boyfriend," he called him, across the walkway from my neighborhood to my work.

Sigh. This is not what I wanted to hear.

I had tried to avoid this precise thing by not allowing the person I was with to walk me to the building entrance. I really wasn't interested in any chisme, gossip, being spread about me. Things had just quieted down in the past month or two after other chisme was spread about me being with someone else. I was not about to become the "open" American girl who has a lot of boyfriends or some other variation based on the movies, which apparently a lot of Peruvians believe are true. 

I mean, it's one thing if it really was my boyfriend. He can then walk me to the entrance, beat his chest, and proclaim to everyone there that I'm his chica. I mean, whatever it takes. But it wasn't my boyfriend, it was just someone I happened to have lunch with a couple three times recently and now is officially just somebody I used to know in this brief moment of my life.

But I had overlooked that people inside the building can see outside and, at any given moment, are doing just that.

I decided to play it off.

ME: Oh, you know, all us rubias look alike.
HIM: Yes, maybe, but only one of you dresses in black with the same red sandals and bag you have now.
ME: Oh, well, maybe that girl has great style like me, jajaja.
HIM: Maybe. But I also saw this same girl with the same guy in Lince a little after Christmas when I was driving to [X location]. I think they were eating ice cream?
ME: [insert internal "fuck me!" here, followed by long pause while I search for something to say or just let him end the conversation]
HIM: [Now realizing I'm not going to cave] It looked like they were a couple. I watched them walk all the way across the bridge. But maybe when I saw them outside here [this office building], she seemed confused and the boyfriend seemed angry. And maybe...[insert some surprisingly astute observation about the guy--how limeños notice this stuff amazes me because they're always right!].
ME: Hmm, perhaps that's true.
HIM: When I saw them in Lince, they looked happier but still... [insert another astute observation about the guy].
ME: Well, maybe the girl thought the same and did something about it.
HIM: I hope so. She appears like such a sweet girl, I think she deserves better.
ME: Oh! [insert blush here] Well, that was nice of you to worry about her. And now it's time for *this* girl to say goodbye [as I silently curse myself for sticking out and make a mental list to not wear X, Y, Z, and especially not those bright red sandals again].

And end scene.

Good grief. If he saw me twice, then who else saw me? Especially outside my work? I thought I just had to worry about the annoying security guards, one of whom was leaning his entire body outside the entrance to get a look at us while the other security guard raced behind the gate to see us up close. I complete forgot about all the folks behind the smoked windows.

This wasn't the first time a student had seen me with this person. I remember back in July someone had seen us outside another building I work at in another neighborhood and then reported this to me, describing the person in detail and how we looked while we were talking and crossing the street. I don't know if my students, particularly my male students, feel protective of me or what. That has to be some of it.

Hmph. I know these things happen in the U.S., too. I'm from a small town in Virginia, and I'd often see the same people or they'd see me. It was no big surprise. One person even reported to my dad once when I was 16 that I was driving his car in some area I wasn't supposed to be in at some time I was supposed to be at my brother's soccer practice. These things happened all the time.

But Lima's not small. The thing is, though it may be a city of nine million people, many live in a relatively small radius of nine or ten neighborhoods. I spend most of my time in four of them, sometimes going to parts of the other five or so. So it's not really surprising given how many people I know through work and social events that someone at some point is bound to see me.

I know this other student, who's not my actual student but who I've met before when I evaluated which level of English he's at several months ago. We are always running into each other in the elevator and we say hello, but that's it. Now I see him in another office building a lot of times. That's not really a surprise given the company I'm contracted to teach English at has multiple offices. But then I see him Christmas shopping at the mall in a completely different neighborhood, driving by in his car, whatever. Maybe he sees me on these occasions, too. I think it's funny because there are a lot of other people I'd rather see, not some dude I only met once several months ago. Go figure.

The point is, people are going to see you and vice versa. And they will really notice you. And vice versa. I bet you that if you visited me in my neighborhood but couldn't find my apartment, you could just ask someone on the street and they'd tell you where I lived and maybe even where I was at that moment. This is just how it is here. In some ways it's strangely comforting, because I guess if anything happened to me, everyone would know it, and maybe someone would actually help me. But on the otherhand, it's kinda creepy that everything I do is for public consumption.

So make of it what you will, but you must accept it if you want to make it here.