Jorge Chavez Monument

This is one of my favourite monuments in Lima. It struck a chord with me when I was a child because my aunts Toya and Segundina, my uncle Orlando, and my cousins Mari and Mariana, lived a block away on Yauyos street. The monument is also on the way to the city center, thus there were many occasions to pass by it. It was also notable to me in that, unlike so many other monuments around, I knew the story of the figures depicted and the event being conmemorated.

The monument conmemorates the 1910 flight of Jorge Chávez from Brig, Switzerland, to Domodossola, Italy, on a specially modified Bleriot XI monoplane. Chávez was a Peruvian aeronaut raised in France and is the hero of Peruvian aviation. On his famous flight he set a world altitude record at 2651 meters (8697 feet) and became the first person to fly over the Alps.

Unfortunately, as he prepared to land, a crosswind sheared off the wings of his plane causing it to nosedive into ground from 60 feet, seriously wounding Chávez, who died from his wounds four days later. Thus, the monument itself depicts the fatal flight of Icarus, in ancient Greek mythology the son of the inventor Daedalus, who designed wood, wax, and feather wings for himself and Icarus in order to escape the isle of Crete where they were being imprisoned by a Greek king. The wings worked, but Icarus, exhuberant and unmindful of his father's warning, flew too close to the sun which melted the wax, causing Icarus to plunge to his death.

The monument depicts four figures of Icarus, one on each face of the monument: Icarus taking flight, rising, rising higher, and finally beginning to fall, such that as one progressed around the traffic circle each stage in Icarus' flight would be revealed. Or, would be if the design and the traffic were aligned.

As it turned out, the monument was designed by a European artist and thus was intended to be viewed from traffic proceeding clockwise, but Peruvians drive on the right side of the road so traffic enters and moves around the circle counterclockwise and counter to the perspective of the monument!

Day at the Beach

On Sunday, to get away from Lima for a bit, we loaded ourselves into my cousin Juancho's and my uncle Willy's cars and headed down to Punta Hermosa, hoping for a change of scenery and a good seafood meal by the ocean.

Punta Hermosa is a a beach town a few kilometers south of Lima. It is just south of these islands, which face the long, long beach of San Pedro, where I often spent time with my friends the Zamudio's when I was a child. Their mom would pile us kids into her Mini and we'd drive down for the day. The surf was notoriously rough at that beach, but that just added to the excitement of it. The islands are called the San Pedro Islands, but are often referred to as The Whale.

As for Punta Hermosa itself, the water was quite rough today, but the town has a nice, curving beach, one end of which is marked by a small peninsula which was once an island separated from the mainland by a few dozen yards. As it was a favoured fishing spot, the townfolk built a causeway to it, and today due to the accumulation of sand along the causeway, it is no longer an island. It is presumed -no one seems to know for sure- that it was this outcropping that gave the locale its name as Punta Hermosa means "beatiful point."

Perhaps due to the rough surf or to some offshore feeding frenzy by large fish or dolphins, the beach was littered with pieces of jellyfish, including this singular chunck which led to all manner of crude jokes due to its resemblance to certain parts of a woman's anatomy.

We spent about and hour walking and playing on the beach before lunch at an ocean-front restaurant, and had a great time all around, before heading home and collapsing.

Here are two videos of the day. The first shows a crab crawling around my niece's leg and Mito rounding it up and then chasing his daughter down the beach with it. The second shows Mito with the girls braving the surf.

Nishida

After stopping by La Bombonniere I decided to walk a block further up Burgos street to look for another small eatery I had heard about.

My path took me past the long abandoned Clinica Italiana. The clininic, a large edifice in that grand, marble-clad institutional style so common in the first half of the 20th century, was establsihed by the Societa Italiana di Beneficenza e Asistenza and was long counted among the better health care centers in the city.

I have memories of it because my grandfather was interned there at one point in the 1970s. He was so badly off that my parents took my brother and I there to see him in what amounted to an unspoken chance to say good bye. To our great joy h e recovered from that illness, and lived for another decade.

In the 1990s the hospital was forced to shut down as a result of the hostage crisis at the nearby Japanese ambassador's residence. It has since been acquired by the Mapfre company which planned to reopen it with a crematorium, which has not happened due to the neighbors' opposition. Until, and if, that gets resolved, the clinic is left to the vultures which haunt its roof.


At the end of the block, I found what I was looking for: a small, hole-in-the-wall restaurant, without an external sign. This is Bodega Nishida, which began as corner grocery store run, as so many in this city, by Japanese immigrants. The son of the family, Carlos Nishida, acquired a knack for cooking and added cooked foods to the family business. In time this was expanded into Nishida restaurant right next door to the shop.

Nishida is known -among those who know about it- for its sandwiches, and specially for the unique flavor of its glazed pork (lechon glaceado) sandwiches. The pork is slowly cooked with cognac, pisco, red wine, honey, sugar, and aji colorado.


I had never eaten there before so I decided to eat my sandwich plain, without any dressings or condiments, the better to taste the pork. I must say that it was delicious, and well worth the search to be sure.

With Nishida being only two or three blocks from home, it may well get another visit from me at some lunch time.



Nishida
Burgos 310
San Isidro - Lima

La Bonbonniere

Just a block from San Felipe, on the fourth block of Burgos street, there is to be found one of Lima's classic cafes, La Bonbonniere. It has been there as long as I can remember and used to be famed for its pastries and, well, its bon bons. As as kid, I would occasionally be taken there by my parents, who would let me pick out a bon bon. To a child like myself the selection of treats, in its many shapes and colors, was as heady as their taste.

In the 1980s, however, La Bonbonniere -like so many institutions- fell on hard times due to the severe economic crisis and the war. It limped on, and was dealt what well could have been its death knell by the hostage crisis at the nearby Japanese ambassador's residence in 1996, which caused the police and military to cordon off the area. La Bonbonniere's owner, a lady from Belgium, was forced to sell the business.

Fortunately, it was picked up by Marisa Giulfo, one of Lima's most noted restauranteurs and caterers, and La Bonbonniere was revived, although now as a cafe and patisserie. Today the cafe is a bit more upscale than in its previous incarnation, if that can be imagined.

I decided to stop by there yesterday afternoon for a snack, and was well-rewarded with a chicken and mushroom empanada (turnover) and a capuccino.

The price for a prix fixe lunch (s/. 35) at La Bonbonniere is fairly high compared to places not too far away where a 3-course lunch can be obtained for s/. 6 (2 dollars), but the quality of the food is incomparable.

I might suggest that Susana and her friend, Aricia, head over there for the Tea Hour when they'll be here later in the month.

La Bonbonniere
Burgos 415
San Isidro - Lima

The Eye that Weeps

El Ojo que Llora is a singular monument in Lima's Campo de Marte ("Field of Mars") park, a gift to the people of Peru from Danish artist Lika Mutal. Moved and inspired by a photographic exhibit on the civil war which Peru endured throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Mutal designed a monument intended to commemorate the dead of that conflict and to inspire reflection on violence and the passions which lead to it, as well as its effects.

The monument, unveiled in August 2005, consists of an eye-like stone embedded in a larger one, set upright in the center of a labyrinth. From the "eye" -when it is on and open to the public- water drips constantly in the manner of tears. The labyrinth is of crushed purple marble, and is bordered by 32,000 rounded stones, on some 26,000 of which volunteers wrote the names, ages, and dates of death or disappearance of victims of political violence from the war.

It is this latter feature that makes El Ojo que Llora such a singular, and controversial, monument, as it includes and mixes not only civilian victims, but soldiers and police officers, and accused subversives killed in prison by the police. Although this was uncontroversial at the time, and even a feature for which the piece was lauded, in time reactionaries seized upon it to defame the artist and attack her work.

In part that was due to a perplexing dictum from the Interamerican Court for Human Rights in 2006, which -along with finding that the Peruvian state was liable for the extrajudicial execution of several dozen imprisoned Shining Path prisoners in 1992, and that the families were owed indemnizations- ordered that their names be added to the monument, a monument over which neither the Court nor Peru's central government had jurisdiction. That not only brought indignation from Peru's conservatives, but then raised it to a fever pitch against the monument itself when it was revealed that those names had been there all along.

In the context of a generalized offensive against the left in this country, conservative and outright reactionary commentators verbally attacked and insulted Lika Mutal and El Ojo que Llora as "a monument to terrorism," and figures all the way up to Congressmembers called for the removal of the monument. Thankfully they did not hold sway.

In Septemeber 2007, however, El Ojo que Llora was severely vandalized. Orange paint was poured on the central stone and splattered on the name stones, many hundreds of which were knocked loose, scattered, and even broken. The stones were put back in place, but it has proved impossible to fully remove all traces of the paint.

Today, el Ojo que Llora is kept behind locked gates -I had to sneak in through a hole in the fence, and was soon ejected by a guard- and only open to the public on a few days a month. The names on the stones are fading, being barely discernible, which is perhaps in keeping with the country which, it seems, would rather forget rather than remember, reflect upon, and understand the violence which produced those names.

Update on the Graña House

Back in August I made mention of the house above, located on the corner of Av. Salaverry and Jirón Mariátegui in Lima's Jesús María district in relation to its appearing in a 1944 film about life in Lima, Lima Family. In 1944 it was occupied by the Graña Garland family, whose scion, Francisco Graña, was a noted physician and surgeon.

In 2003 one of the last, if not the last, surviving children of Dr. Graña, Mocha, passed away in the house after a long illness. The property, alredy neglected at that time, sat apparently empty for some time thereafter.

I happened to be strolling by this morning and, noticing a plaque near the doorway and a seal above it, I approached to take closer look. Nowadays, it turns out, the grand old house is occupied and used by San Marcos University's School of Letters and Humanities.