Sun After Dark: Flights Into the Foreign

THE PLACE ACROSS THE MOUNTAINS

One midsummer evening in La Paz, just before New Year's Eve, I went out into the dark to find a taxi to take me to the modern suburbs. I hadn't slept--or not slept--for many days, it seemed, and so, not quite myself, I hailed a cab and told the driver to take me to a Mexican restaurant I had read about, down in the warm valley to the south. We followed the curves of a mountain road, and came very soon to a darkened grid of long, straight streets, stretching in every direction. I repeated the address of the place to the driver, but Indian names are hard to make out for a foreigner, and soon, very soon, we were lost.

Security guards watched us from their posts, outside the villas of the rich; every last detail seemed picked out in the lunar quiet. Up above, in the commotion of the Indian area, everything was a swarm of color; here the streets were laid out as precisely as if with a ruler and pencil. We turned one way, turned another, and on every side were faced with long, straight streets, concluding, in one place only, at the mountain. I began to worry that we'd never find our way out of the dark maze.

I paid the driver and got out, shivering in the midsummer chill, and began to walk down one street, then another. But there was nothing to be found. Only the guards, standing stock-still outside their shuttered gates; the parked cars and small trees and sleeping houses. At the end of one little road, a sharp slab of mountain, bone white and cold in the dark. I could have been back in California (or in the mock-Californian suburb where I live now in Japan).

I went on walking down the street--its straight lines, its precise edges made to insist on its distance from Bolivia--and as I did, following this path, and then that one, the rock face before me silver under the full moon, suddenly I had an eerie premonition: I'd been in this unremarkable place before. I knew its shape, the feel of it; I knew just how the streets would run, silent and straight, and then end up at the mountain.

And then, as I continued, I realized that I really had been here before: half a lifetime before--more--at the age of eighteen. I'd been traveling around South America with a schoolfriend, and at some point we had landed up in just this place. An unexceptional grid of streets that did everything they could to announce their closeness to the future.

I'd been drawn, at the time, to everything that lay outside my cozy, rectilinear neighborhood in California, and I'd come back from South America impressed by what might make an impression on any teenager: the golden, palmy beaches of Brazil; the high silence of the Altiplano, nothing but llamas and rounded hills with snow on them, a cold lake in the distance; the excited girls at the Hotel Picasso in Bogot? whom, in our innocence, we'd taken to be innocent travelers like ourselves. When I'd returned home, I'd brought back a whole carousel of slides, visible and invisible, from my adventure. And unexceptional suburban streets in La Paz had not been among them.

A quarter of a century later, though, sitting at my desk in Japan, suddenly I'd been visited, piercingly, by images of Bolivia. Its high, denim skies; the Indian women laboring up the narrow, high-walled streets past the cathedral towards the heavens; the haunted statues of Tiahuanaco, looking out on an emptiness so absolute it might have been the same a thousand years before. For some reason, I felt I had to go back there, to a place that had hardly made an impression on me, so I'd thought, when I was young.

I gathered my things and came back, at a time when all the world was suddenly talking and thinking of war, and what I found, in the dark, was an eighteen-year-old boy, with long hair down to his shoulders, in a blue-and-yellow poncho, at the end of a grueling three-month trip