Like any good story, just when you think things can’t possibly get any worse, they do.

My scorched and tarnished lungs have been branded by the Lima air with its hot and searing fire, and the thought of enduring another two weeks this way is enough to send me running for a fire extinguisher or, failing that, a tactical nuclear weapon.

So imagine my delight when a little after noon this afternoon my girlfriend interrupted me working on my novel with the announcement that the building next door was on fire and we should really consider making plans to leave the building on rather short order and on a potentially permanent basis.

Our room was perched on top of the third-floor roof, and stepping out into the air one immediately noticed that the visibility dropped to slightly less than a foot, as a massive onrushing cloud of hot white smoke rushed passed me out onto the street below.

The building next door was, it appeared, on fire.

Sirens had been howling for half an hour but I brushed off the annoyance as you do a couple of flies at a picnic: they must not interfere with the activity at hand. But the building next door was most conclusively and spectacularly on fire, and something would need to be done, and really, rather soon.

If you’re going to get burned to death it’s important to make sure your fried corpse is properly dressed so that the medical examiner has something to brighten his day. So I reached into my bag of tricks and pulled out a large yellow bandanna and tied it around my face, cowboy train robber style.

Properly attired I began to move more quickly. Laptop: off: in bag. Passport hidden here: other passport hidden there: money: here: there: can’t remember, time to go: grab a hat (hey, fashion calls) and off we went, the girlfriend and I, down two flights of stairs, through the fluffy oxygen-free clouds a light breeze wafted our way.

Out into the street, and from the park across the way we sat and watched Hiroshima. Huge billows of smoke poured from behind our building, the rainbow of fruit flavours flushing through white to black to grey and back to white again. I held the train robber fashion accessory close to my mouth and fought back a sneeze; I failed, and to the grim amusement of the twenty-odd people gathered in traditional Peruvian style to watch their neighbour’s house burn down, began to sneeze in long, uninterrupted, uninterruptible streams, as airborne snot shot from every facial orifice there was (well, two).

An hour went by. More or less. The smoke got bigger, the smoke got smaller. Finally it got smaller. The cats we rescued from the house stopped mewing their heads off. As the smoke got thinner big chunks of flying soot floated up into the air and scattered their joy throughout the neighbourhood. A cop on a motorbike sirened by, checking out the nearby houses for signs of the fire spreading. It didn’t. We decided to move back in.

The house smelled like a salami warehouse. Even the paint had that smoky flavour, and I don’t even normally lick (or eat) paint. So I sat outside in the tiny front garden with the laptop on my lap until moist white bits of ash started to flavour the keyboard, smearing their yummy goodness all over that finger-based input device.

Turns out the building that burned was a warehouse. Later news brought word that it was in fact a security warehouse. What the heck did that mean? A “security warehouse”? Apparently it houses — or should I say, “housed” — the offices of a security company that takes care of warehouses.

Looks like they could use a little practice.

The foul brew of airborne toxins swarms down the nostrils and into the
lungs, scratching its way down the hatch. The throat itches, evoking a
cough; the eyes, red, burn; various rashes appear. In the morning,
spasms of coughing and sneezing awake you as your body foolishly tries
to expel the poisons it spent the night passively ingesting.

Oh for the love of Lima.

Most tourists are smart. They stick to Miraflores, the upscale enclave
on the shore, where a vigorous ocean breeze cleans the lungs and brushes
the soot from your face.

Not me, though. I wanted to save a whopping twenty bucks for the month I
was here, so instead of Miraflores, welcome to Pueblo Libre, an
otherwise not-so-bad middle class neighbourhood quite a few kilometres
from the ocean. The only problem is that I’m living, working, sleeping,
eating, and trying to avoid exercising in a cloud of smog.

Penny wise, pound foolish, the story of my life.

There’s a YMCA not far from here, and they have a pool. (In Spanish it’s
actually an ACJ, but singing “I want to stay at the ‘Ah, Say, Jo-Ta’, I
want to stay at the ‘Ah, Say, Jo-Ta-Ah’” just doesn’t work nearly as
well.) So I went to said pool, and figured, hey, it’s indoors. I can
exercise in relatively clean air without committing pulmonary suicide at
the same time.

Taking a break between laps I looked up and through my fogged-up goggles
considered the funky ceiling design. Then I looked again, and slowly
propped the goggles onto my forehead. Oh. It wasn’t actually a ceiling
at all, just some blue tarpaulins strapped across an open space above
what was, in fact, an outdoor pool.

The second day here I was astonished to see municipal workers trawling
the main thoroughfares in a tanker truck, pumping water at dessicated
trees at the side of the way. Lima, it turns out, despite the
omnipresent coastal fog, and the constant, handkerchief-drenching
humidity, is actually a desert. The average annual rainfall here is a
mere five centimetres.

In fact winter in Lima maintains an almost constant temperature of about
15C, varying whimsically between 14C and 18C based on factors random
enough to be entirely beyond human comprehension. The only difference
between “inside” and “outside” seems to be that “inside” you cough less
and “outside” your clothes on the washing line develop a thin film of
black dirt.

I find myself suddenly musing on J.R.R. Tolkien’s choice of names in
“The Hobbit”. The dragon, the one Mr. Bilbo Baggins robs, was named
“Smaug”. Tolkien was famous for his hatred of motor cars, and always
rode a bicycle to his job at Oxford. Coincidence? I think not.

Where, exactly, does Lima’s pollution come from? Is it industrial, or
just cars, or what? From what vile monster’s belly comes this
ubiquitous, acrid belch?

An entirely unscientific, indeed un-journalistic survey (I asked my
Colombian girlfriend) suggests that most of Peru’s heavy industry is a
ways north along the Pacific coast, half a dozen hours and more from
Lima. Which leaves only one likely culprit: the automobile, and the
diesel buses that prowl and growl their way through Lima’s streets.

Lima is a city of roughly eight million people — more, if you count the
fringes — and has no train, light rail, subway, or indeed any sort of
public transportation to speak of, except for the aforementioned legion
of big buses, little buses, small buses, tiny buses, monster buses, and
vans.

They pile upon each other, nose to tail, honking and squealing and
cursing their trade, plying their moveable wares for a sol or two, an
ill word always close at hand for the passenger bold enough to complain
at rough treatment.

Living in this cloud of poison it is difficult not to get angry, not to
find buzzing in your thoughts and your dreams words like “city planning”
and “public transportation” and “lung cancer”. Peru, unlike Argentina,
unlike Colombia, is a country that does not work. Do not drink the
water; try not to breathe the air; ready your elbow for the thief at
your side.

Can we not do better, we of the West with laws that mostly work? Can we
not prevent this revolting fate, our cities reduced to poison-clad
monsters, our citizens choked by pollution, our fashionistas in shock at
the soot on their clothes?

Me? I can’t fix Peru. Don’t really want to either, considering the
Street Rudeness Factor. I got a couple weeks more to suck on bus fumes,
then I’m off back to Colombia, a country that may on paper be in the
middle of a civil war, but where at least all three major cities have
something approaching public transportation, you can drink the water,
and, most importantly, you can breathe the air.

Lima of old was The City of Kings. Three hundred years of Viceroys ruled from here, the largest and wealthiest city in the Spanish Empire outside of Madrid.

These days you’d be hard pressed to find any remnant of those former days.

Cleaning the black crust of pollution off my sandal-clad feet each night I have to wonder where it all went wrong, or for that matter if it was ever right. Lima is a city of excesses and extremes, cleanliness and filth, poverty and wealth, but on the street they all have that haunted eye of fear, a sharpened elbow, a rude word, and a lying tongue.

How can we get ahead? How can we stab our neighbour in the back to get there? How can we shove our way to the front of the queue? It’s like living in the United States all over again.

Peruvians are beyond question the worst liars, cheats and thieves I have encountered in South America in a year and a half of travelling and living on this continent. They cheat gringos, of course, but they cheat each other too, also other South Americans (they can pick the accent), and, indeed, anyone who is not from their locale and can be fooled into believing something is worth more than it should be.

The Peruvians have clearly inherited the Roman traits that made “caveat emptor” the byword of that Latin empire.

My main focus for comparison is, of course, the delightfully drug-addled country of Colombia; although that appellation is entirely incorrect, as Peru produces almost as much cocaine as Colombia.

Colombians are in so many ways the contrary of Peruvians. Where Peruvians are cheats and liars, and seem to delight in being rude, like New Yorkers on steroids, Colombians are genuinely friendly, helpful people, who will go out of their way to do you a service, who seem to believe, whether true or no, that it’s more profitable to grow the size of the economic pie than to quarrel over a thin sliver of nothingness.

Two very different studies in capitalism.

Consider the food. Colombia boasts some of the most fertile growing land in South America. Within its borders there there can be found nearly every type of growing region on earth, from the deserts of the north to the jungles of the Amazon, and every mountainous growing region to 5000m and more.

Yet Colombian food is some of the most boring, bland, and generally forgettable food I have ever eaten in my life. In that land of hot pants and hotter women, it’s as though some bizarre puritanical strain courses through the Colombian taste buds. Imagine France and Frenchmen preferring to dine in the traditional English style: boiled potatoes, overcooked beef, and a stiff upper lip for dessert.

Where Colombian food is sterile, boring, and dependably bland, at least it is hygienically prepared. It won’t give you food poisoning. Peruvian food suffers from much greater swings in quality. At the low end is the cheap stuff that will give even the locals the shits. Hygiene is not a very high priority in Peru.

The heights of Peruvians cuisine, however, overshadow Colombia in a mountainous display of chili and ceviche and genuine empathy and understanding for food, what it can be, what it should be, and how to prepare it.

For a long time time I used to think it wasn’t really the fault of Peruvians they were such thieves. Peru, like Ecuador, is overrun by tourists, and, well, I’d probably rob tourists too if I lived here. Easy stupid marks, like shooting fish in a barrel. I mean honestly, some people who travel here walk around with a big flashing neon sign on their forehead that says “Hey! You! Stupid Gringo Tourist From New Jersey Here! You Know, Where Your Cousin Lives? Yeah, You! I Want To Be ROBBED! YES! PLEASE ROB ME! No, Forget The Football Game, I WANT TO BE ROBBED NOW!”

Gringos had corrupted Peruvians and turned them into thieves through the process of tourism. There were lots of tourists in Peru, and lots of thieves; there were hardly any tourists in Colombia, and hardly no thieves. Ergo, stupid tourists with bum bags and loud American accents taught Peruvians and Ecuadorians to be thieves.

Now I begin to wonder if there isn’t more at play. This fear here in Lima is a living, breathing being. It surrounds you and envelopes you in its tightening grip, and grasps cold at your heart. I don’t think I’ve felt like that, really been disturbed by that oppressive atmosphere since Chicago. Colombia may be in the midst of a de facto civil war but people are not generally afraid of each other, nor especially of the government. Here in Lima in the unending shadow of the garua, the permanent coastal fog, here in the shade, in the darkness, the devils are at play in men’s minds, and the fog and the darkness and the fear has entered their souls.

Imagine, if you will, the foreign student of English, fed a diet of solely Standard American Dialect, say, by a teacher from the West Coast of the United States.

Our student speaks good English. Not perfect, but still very good English and has just been sent to New York City for a month of personal and professional business.

The only problem is that he can’t understand a thing anyone says.

Cut to the present tense, and here I am in Lima, a speaker of Spanish as a foreign language very much accustomed to the classical, uninflected speech of Colombia. By contrast, Limeña Spanish has all the guttural power and force of Brooklyn “fuggedaboutit” English and the mouth shape of a Polish butcher trying to get his mouth around American vowels.

Limeñas like to say that of all Latin Americans they speak the purest form of Spanish on the continent. They say this is because the Viceroy lived here for three hundred years, that this was the capital of a vast empire.

That may be. It may also be that New York City is the capital of a vast American empire.

Is there a correlation between capital cities and muscular, unintelligible language?

America is rapidly descending into the straitjacket of fascism. Telephone calls are monitored; emails recorded; web traffic analyzed. The government is watching you, and it is not a friendly gaze. We live in a time of fear.

Historically, one of the few practical checks on tyranny in America has been greed. Greed is the carrot that spurs innovation. Quite simply, insufficient liberty is bad for the bottom line.

So the question is: has the swelling chorus of fascism begun to dampen innovation in America? When will Big Business push back?

Or will they? Perhaps the time of innovation is at an end. An increasing array of frivolous patents are granted each year by the US Patent Office; lawsuits threaten the inventor, engineer and software developer at every turn. Many foreign inventors and engineers find it so hard to get a US visa they simply go somewhere else.

There is another possibility. The Western world view may have already spent itself entirely, its mojo gone, its creative juices spent. There may, in fact, remain only tyranny and stasis. Without the greed that fuels innovation, there will remain no one and nothing to defend the rudimentary vestiges of liberty in America, and the world will fall into the black pit of lock-step, mindless uniformity, critics ruthlessly silenced, creative people crushed under heel as deviants.