He’d thought he knew what labor was. He’d carried tons of tar paper up six flights of stairs, a hundred-pound roll at a time, at a building site in Guayaquil, he’d stood in raw sewage outside Chiclayo and shoveled for ten hours, he’d raked hot asphalt under midday sun, but not until he was slipping and crawling in the mud of the Andes, in freezing fog and pelting hail, pulling out stones with cracked and swollen fingers, hacking at the earth with a dull-bladed implement, the altitude sharp-bladed in his brain, the blood from broken capillaries in his throat, did he put to rest the question of his strength.
When he’d left New Orleans, a year and a half earlier, his only plan had been to have no plan. With a few hundred dollars and the Spanish he’d taught himself while waiting for a passport, he’d crossed the Mexican border at Matamoros and headed farther south, intending to be gone for two years, the same term he would have served in the army. When he’d exhausted his money, on a boat passage to Guayaquil, he’d become an itinerant day laborer, motiveless in every respect except the need to work. If he saw a bus packed with other workers, he squeezed onto it without caring where it was going, not because he wished to understand the underprivileged but simply because, if he didn’t work, he didn’t eat.
Neither having nor seeking a larger motive, he’d been surprised to find one in the highlands. The fundamental equation of human existence—soil + water + plants + labor = food—was the most applied of sciences, nothing philosophical about it, but the Andean farmers’ way with their seedlings and their tubers, their wresting of sustenance from the harshest margins of arability, was a fulfillment of the plant physiology and genetics, the physical and atmospheric chemistry, the nitrogen cycles, the molecular jujitsu of chlorophyll, that he’d studied in school without appreciating their existential crux; and it had given him a plan. He would stay on through the potato harvest, complete his two-year term, and return to Illinois to study the impure science of agronomy.
The Cuéllars lived in a hamlet an hour’s walk from the town of Tres Fuentes. Once a week, after the crops had been planted, Clem descended on a boggy track through the puna, past pockets of hardwood forest whose recession upslope made the gathering of firewood arduous, to a post office conceivably colonial in age. Unlike the Cuéllars, whose first language was Quechua, the postal clerk spoke perfect Spanish. He was Clem’s sole connection to the world beyond the highlands, his fútbol-themed calendar the only marker of that world’s chronology. Every week, Clem returned to find another line of days x-ed out.
One afternoon, when x’s had consumed half of February, the clerk had a small package for him. He took it outside and sat down on the rim of a dry, ruined fountain. The air was scented with the smoke of kitchen fires, the sun hidden by a ceiling of pale cloud through which he could feel its warmth. In the package were three pairs of wool socks and a letter from his mother.
There were two kinds of letters, the ones you eagerly tore open and the ones you had to force yourself to read, and his mother’s were of the latter kind. Others she’d sent him, in Guayaquil and Lima, had made him angry, especially at Becky. If Becky hadn’t been so bent on her religious do-goodery, Perry couldn’t have pissed away six thousand dollars and she could have gone to college, instead of getting herself pregnant and married, at nineteen, to an affable lightweight. But there was nothing he could do from South America, and his anger had passed in the daily struggle for bread, the dysentery he was prone to, the repeated theft of his spare clothes, the bother of acquiring new ones without resorting, himself, to stealing. Experience had taught him to live with nothing of value except his passport, and so it was with the news of Perry’s collapse and Becky’s disastrous choices, his mother’s sorrows: it was better to travel light.
January 26, 1974
Dear Clem,
Your father and I were blessed to receive your letter from Tres Fuentes and learn that you are safe and well there. Even if you’re working hard, it must be a relief to be in the beautiful High Andes after all your time in cities, and I’m so glad to have an address where I know a letter is sure to reach you. （You didn’t mention the second letter I sent to the post office in Lima—I assume you didn’t get it?） It must be difficult to summarize so many interesting experiences in a short letter home, so many thoughts and impressions, and I understand you can’t write every week, but please know that every word you write to us is precious.
We enjoyed your thoughts about agricultural science but of course I’m especially curious about the people you’re with. It warms my heart to hear of the interest you’ve taken in Felipe’s family and your willingness to share in their hardships, and I think your father is more than a little envious. If our lives had gone a different way, he would have liked to be a missionary—he has such deep empathy for people whose existence is a struggle. We miss you more and more with every day that passes, but it’s a comfort to know that you’re developing that empathy yourself. I can’t imagine a better reward for your two years of “service.”