The City of Memory and Other Stories from Peru | Translation

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The following English translation was generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence.

[Daniel A.]: This is Radio Ambulante. I’m Daniel Alarcón.

My father, Renato, was born in Arequipa, Peru. He was raised there until he was 20. That was before he moved to Lima to study his third year of medicine, before he met my mom, before he emigrated with my sisters and me to the United States. And you could say two seemingly contradictory truths about him and his relationship with Arequipa. They contradict each other, but they’re both true at the same time. First: that he hasn’t lived in Arequipa again since he moved to Lima in 1962. And second: that, in a certain sense, he has never left his hometown.

Let me explain. As kids, growing up in a gringo suburb in the state of Alabama, far from Arequipa, my sisters and I learned to use Arequipa slang that doesn’t appear in any dictionary. For example: arreconchúmense, my father would tell us, so that we kids would make room for him on the couch. If something broke, it descuajeringaba. If he wanted to make sure I understood, he’d ask me, entendikichu?

And well, my sisters and I learned the anthem of “La I,” the Colegio Nacional de la Independencia Americana, where he finished high school.

We also learned the names of Arequipa’s three emblematic volcanoes: Chachani, Pichu Pichu, and of course the legendary Misti. “It’s not for nothing that one is born at the foot of a volcano,” an Arequipa intellectual said in 1891—a phrase that we, a century later, memorized. We grew up certain that the question, “what is the most beautiful city in the world?” had only one possible answer: Arequipa. The geographic distance from one place to another can be measured in kilometers, or in thousands of kilometers. But that figure has nothing to do with emotional closeness, which can be so powerful that it’s passed down, even across generations. You inherit memories so vivid, so special, that you almost believe you lived them yourself.

As a kid we went every chance we got, and as an adult I’ve also visited to see family, though not with the regularity that my old man returns—of course. For him, it’s as if seeing the Misti at least once a year is something he needs for his well-being.

All of this is a preamble, to tell you what happened a few months ago when I went to Arequipa with my family, and my father happened to be there too. One afternoon, while Carolina and Eliseo were resting, I suggested to my old man that we walk to his old neighborhood, Miraflores, to look for the house where he grew up. From our hotel downtown it wasn’t that far, maybe half an hour on foot, and he liked the idea. We walked slowly, taking in every corner, and he told me about his childhood and teenage years, his friends, the routes he took to the stadium, to school, to church. The streets where he played soccer, his cousins’ houses, his first girlfriends. You could hear the emotion in his voice, because of course, behind today’s city, the city anyone can see, there’s another city, hidden and almost invisible. The city of memory, where a privileged few can still make out their own recollections.

So we passed by Tarapacá street, by San Martín avenue. We reached Mayta Cápac Park, which we crossed diagonally. It’s worth noting that this park didn’t exist when my old man was born, and he remembers when the trees were planted, skinny and weak. Now they’re big and full. Finally, we got to Jorge Chávez street, to the number that used to be his house. It didn’t look like the house from his memories, he told me, but years pass, and decades pass, and of course you forget the details. He didn’t seem entirely convinced, but we took the photo anyway, happy to have reached our goal. We’d found the street and the number he remembered. And that was it. But instead of turning back the way we came, I suggested we keep going to the next corner and turn there, toward downtown.

So we kept walking and there, in the middle of the block, everything changed. By chance or luck or fate, I don’t know, but as we walked, my old man told me that the gate of his house had the letters R. G. engraved on it. His mother’s initials. My grandmother’s. Rosa Guzmán. And as he told me this, we were both looking at the gates of the neighboring houses. And suddenly we saw them: three houses down, the letters R. G. etched into a rusted gate.

We got excited. We hurried over, curious, ready to take photos of the front of the house, and I noticed that just a few feet away there was a man looking at us like we were the strangest thing he’d ever seen. He had keys in his hand, and we were standing in front of the gate—clearly his gate… My father’s house, but with a different number.

Now we know the confusion happened because, a few years back, they changed the house numbers on Jorge Chávez street. That’s why the house with the number my old man remembered didn’t match the house in his memory.

So the man came over, a little confused, like, who are these guys, and right away I asked him if he was the owner. He said yes. That his parents had bought the house in the late ’80s, when he was a kid, and he’d lived there ever since. My father couldn’t believe the coincidence. Neither could I. But I didn’t hesitate. I immediately explained who my father was, and then, with a little too much confidence, asked if we could go in. He gave us an odd look, but then I think he saw our faces full of emotion and decided to trust us. He let us in.

[Daniel’s dad]: So you knew my sister Vilma?

[Owner]: Yes. She’s [unintelligible] And my mom actually called her too because something was missing, some paperwork…

[Daniel’s dad]: The documents…

[Owner]: The documents. And she told her. That very day, Doña Rosa had died. I’m at my mom’s wake. She just passed away.

[Daniel A.]: By then I was already recording on my phone. The man opened the door for us.

[Daniel’s dad]: Look at this. This little door is exactly the same.

[Daniel A.]: Yeah.

[Daniel’s dad]: Let me say this. In my time, this was the living room.

[Owner]: Yes, this was our living room too. Yes, yes, yes. This is my parents’ bedroom.

[Daniel’s dad]: And this was—I don’t remember what this was in my time.

[Daniel A.]: It’s a four-room house, with a small central courtyard beneath an open lot. You can feel the years, everything covered in a layer of dust, the floors worn down. Part of the house isn’t used anymore, the owner explained to us, because it flooded. It seems the roof collapsed in the last rains.

[Daniel’s dad]: This was the hall…

[Owner]: But he changed the glass so the water wouldn’t get in. Because it used to get in.

[Daniel A.]: Right.

[Daniel A.]: My dad, unable to contain his emotion, examined every corner and detail of that house, so worn down by time, as if it were the Palace of Versailles. Utterly amazed. Every corner brought back a memory.

[Daniel’s dad]: Here was… we called it the pantry because we kept things there for….

[Owner]: I use it for storage too. My grandfather used to live there. For a while.

[Daniel’s dad]: Then, at the back of the kitchen. Uh-huh. And then the yard. Is the yard still there?

[Owner]: It’s a garden now.

[Daniel’s dad]: Ah, now it’s a garden.

[Daniel A.]: And it all felt more meaningful because even though the house has held up over the years, if we come back in 4 or 5 years, we probably won’t find it there. In fact, even on this visit, we almost didn’t find it, honestly.

[Daniel A.]: Given how fast Arequipa—like so many other cities in Latin America—is changing, it wouldn’t surprise me if the owner sells the property soon so an apartment building can go up there… And that place, which was the setting for decades of memories, will no longer exist.

We ended the visit in the yard, the garden… A big open-air space.

[Daniel’s dad]: Look, wow.

[Owner]: The garden.

[Daniel’s dad]: This has changed completely.

[Daniel’s dad]: But do you know what this used to look like, Daniel?

[Daniel A.]: What was it like?

[Daniel’s dad]: Dirt. All dirt. And there was a hole there. A big hole.

[Daniel A.]: That day, the grass and plants had taken over the garden. I immediately pictured my dad playing with his siblings, my aunt Vilma, my uncle Javier. Standing there, my dad looked around at everything and smiled. He smiled like someone who’d come home after a long trip. He asked me to take a photo of him with the owner, whose name we’d forgotten to ask in all the excitement. His name is Juan Carlos. Then we said our goodbyes. To Juan Carlos, and to the house…

And that’s it. I’m telling you this as an invitation, because reconnecting with the past, even if just for a few minutes, can be an endless source of joy in a world of constant change and uncertainty.

These last few weeks at Radio Ambulante, we’ve been doing exactly that. Reconnecting with our past. We’ve been telling stories for 15 years now, hundreds of episodes… And even though we always look forward, revisiting the first stories of this project, our beginnings and first steps, matters too. It gives us perspective, reminds us how far we’ve come.

So today we’re staying in Peru, and we’re bringing you three stories we hope you’ll enjoy. And right now, we’re heading back to the beginning. The first story we ever produced. Los Polizones—The Stowaways.

And it starts with this man.

[Mayer]: My name is Mayer.

[Daniel A.]: It was August 2011, in a gym at Los Angeles, where I met Mayer Olórtegui. He is 73 years old. I met him at a gym in Los Angeles, where he boxes three times a week. You can tell. He’s short, strong, muscular despite his age, quick to smile, and a little vain. The truth is, Mayer is a fighter in every sense of the word. As a kid, his fight was for survival on the streets of Callao, Peru. That’s how he met his best friend, Mario.

Mario taught Mayer how to steal handfuls of rice by hiding them in his shirt sleeves. They’d go together to the port to clean fishing boats, earning 10 cents a boat and a little something to eat. It was a hard life. As kids they faced down hunger… but as grown men, they’d have to face down death. Nancy López tells us the story of these two friends and the adventure that would mark their lives forever.

[Nancy López]: It’s a hot afternoon in Callao, 1959. Two friends run into each other again after several years apart. Mayer, 18, was a dockworker and had already crossed the Atlantic more times than he could count. His friend Mario, 25, had never left the humble neighborhood where they both grew up. After the hugs, they catch up. Mario listens closely to Mayer’s adventures. And he works up the nerve to make him a proposal.

[Mayer]: “Hey, there’s a boat leaving over there,” he tells me, “why don’t we go, hidden on the boat?” I said, “No, that scares me.” He said, “Come on, I know how it’s done.” So I got up the nerve.

[Nancy López]: Mayer tells me this story in one of his seven stores in Los Angeles. He’s surrounded by quinceañera dresses in every color. And even though more than fifty years have passed since that trip, he remembers it like it was yesterday.

[Nancy López]: Mayer sits behind the counter, grabs a sheet of pink paper lying nearby, lowers his head, and starts drawing me a map. The route north that would take them to the United States.

[Mayer]: Okay, Callao… Over here, New York. Here. New York here.

[Nancy López]: The boat left Peru for New York, going up along the coast of Ecuador and Colombia, crossing the Panama Canal, through the Gulf of Mexico, up to the Atlantic. Mayer, who had already sailed that route before, figured it would take about 13 days.

[Mayer]: Thirteen days. That’s what I had in mind. And we got ready. We packed canned tuna, we packed water, we packed headache pills, medicine, other things, we brought a big knife, we brought a flashlight too… and we climbed aboard…

[Nancy López]: The night before the boat set sail… they hid in the very last hold.

[Mayer]: You know the boat has these holes where they run a rope that’s tied to the dock. So we climbed up through there, up the rope. And that’s where we stayed.

[Nancy López]: The next day, the boat set off. [Sound of a ship] It carried tons of cargo—fruit, vegetables. It carried 200 dockworkers from more than a dozen countries… and two young Peruvians, hidden away in the last hold. Mayer and his friend Mario, each one lying down, holding onto a wooden plank, in total darkness.

[Mayer]: You couldn’t see anything, we only used the flashlight to eat, to look at each other, to ask each other things, and then we’d turn it off, just like that. And we always felt the thump-thump of the sea, you know, and the movement of the boat, thump thump thump thump thump. We always felt that.

[Nancy López]: Every once in a while they’d talk, about how uncomfortable the trip was, about the sacrifice. But at the end of the day, they were two friends going through an adventure together. It was hard, but not impossible. Or at least that’s how they saw it. After a week, the darkness and the rocking of the boat became unbearable.

[Mayer]: You feel the impact, bam, bam! The boat rises up like this. There are 40-foot waves that swallow up the boat, you understand? Sometimes the boat goes up like this, like this, and then it falls, boom, boom, like that… It’s all waves, all noise, you don’t even know what day it is anymore. Because you can’t see daylight. All you see is darkness. It’s horrible, it’s horrible… A lot of times we cried too.

[Nancy López]: And that’s how thirteen days went by.

[Mayer]: We didn’t have any food left. So we started searching through the cargo: apples, melons, watermelons.

[Nancy López]: But something wasn’t adding up. If thirteen days had passed, they should have already been in New York. On top of the discomfort of the trip, there’s now a terrifying uncertainty. And that’s how a hard trip turns into real torture.

[Mayer]: My friend asks me, “Where are we?” Since we were in the last hold, I told him, “Panama,” you know, because I thought that’s where the boat had gone. I said, “I think it’s Panama, but maybe Colombia.” I told him, “Well hey, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know what this boat’s been doing.” We were just trying to survive.

[Nancy López]: Survive, and not lose hope. But little by little, their bodies started giving out. Always sitting, backs against the wall, everything hurt—their feet, their legs, their spines. They could barely move. There came a point when Mario couldn’t stand up anymore.

[Mayer]: So I’d bring him his food. And feeling your friend like that is horrible, horrible.

[Nancy López]: And a little later, Mayer collapsed too.

[Mayer]: By then, I think it had been about four days since I could climb over to the other hold to get food. I felt really weak.

[Nancy López]: There was nothing left to do but wait.

[Mayer]: My friend would tell me, let them catch us already, let them throw us out, let them do whatever with us. I’d tell him, no, Mario, have faith. And then all we felt was the boat come to a stop.

[Mayer]: I grabbed the knife because I thought we were still out at sea, that they might throw us overboard. But the men who shined their lights on us said, “No, no, no, no, no.” Then they asked us where we were from… I told the man, and tears rolled down his face…

[Nancy López]: There was a Greek dockworker who spoke a bit of Spanish. He asks Mayer the date they’d boarded the ship.

[Mayer]: He went to check with the officers there, he came back, he told us, “The boat left Callao on that date, it went to Chile, it didn’t go to Panama, it went to Chile, then it came back to Callao, and from Callao it came here on its regular route,” he told me.

[Nancy López]: So the trip hadn’t been 13 days, or 15, or 20.

[Mayer]: 26 days, the Greek guy told us.

[Nancy López]: 26 days of hunger, of darkness, of fear, but they made it, alive, finally, to New York. The dockworkers hosed them down and gave them food. At 5 in the afternoon, they were smuggled out of the port hidden in some train cars. Mayer ached all over. But Mario was worse off. He could barely walk.

[Mayer]: They left us on a corner on a street called Columbus, Columbus and 26th. And they put five dollars in each of our pockets. “Good luck.”

[Nancy López]: Hours after leaving the port, Mayer and his friend Mario find themselves in the lobby of a building in Brooklyn, eating soup with their hands. A woman has given them a couple of women’s sweaters to keep warm, and they don’t know what to do. Until Mario has an idea, another proposal… that, without meaning to, would shape the rest of Mayer’s life.

[Mayer]: Let’s do something, he tells me, “You see that door? Which way do you want to go, left or right?” I tell him, I don’t know, Mario. He said, I’ll go left and you go right. We’ll see each other again someday, he told me. You know, he said, I’m more street-smart than you, right? That’s why I’m telling you to choose which way. Right is better. And that’s what happened. We split up, and right to the right there was a subway entrance.

[Mayer]: It was really sad because, well, going through things like that together, you know? And that’s just how fate goes, sweetheart.

[Daniel A.]: The two friends wouldn’t see each other again for ten years. By then, their lives had already gone down two very different paths. This is how Mayer tells it:

[Mayer]: I’m walking into the deli and Mario was walking out with a six-pack. He looks at me like that, I look at him. “Mayer!” he says. Me, “Mario!” And we hug. What a reunion! 

[Daniel A.]: Nancy López was the first paid employee of Radio Ambulante and is now a senior producer at the podcast Snap Judgment. This story was edited by me. Sound design by Martina Castro.

We’ll be right back.

[Daniel A.]: We’re back on Radio Ambulante.

[Flores Simbrón]: No, no, I know that’s normal, you know? Of course I saw that there were young people, adults, you know, that were blind. But I didn’t know how many.

[Daniel A.]: This is Flores Simbrón and he lives in Parán, a small town in the Peruvian Andes. When he moved here, 20 years ago, he thought it would be a good place to live and he didn’t pay any mind to what some people were saying: that a lot of blind men lived in that town.

[Flores Simbrón]: Because blindness is very common here. Then there’s no water. I mean Parán, it says in the Bible that Paran was a desert. Nothing grows, nothing. Just rocks.

[Daniel Alarcón]: Today, the story of an isolated village and a blindness that no one could explain. Our producers are Marco and Annie Avilés. Here’s Marco.

[Marco Avilés, producer]: Since it was founded, toward the beginning of the last century, Parán has been an isolated village. It’s only 4 hours away from Lima, between tall mountains, and most of the residents are peach farmers.  Aside from the harvest, which mostly goes to the coast, the village doesn’t have much contact with the outside world.

Around the 60s, people started to notice a problem. A lot of men, after turning 50, went blind. The illness affected them from childhood. Mothers noticed their children running into things or falling. And it got worse as they got older. And no one knew why exactly.

[Jessica Palomares]: But in my son’s case, yes, I realized when he started not walking so well. He would want to walk and he would trip and run into things.

[Marco]: This is Jessica Palomares. And her son is now 10 years old. He’s thin and has straight black hair and a few rabbit like teeth. His name is Lucho and he was only 3 when he started stumbling at night.

[Jessica]: And I was saying “Why son? What’s wrong, can’t you see?”. And he didn’t want to tell me: “No mom, no. You ran into me,” that’s what he would say… Then I realized that he would put his hand on the pot or grab the candle…

[Marco]: It happened all the time. Every night, Lucho would trip, fall and run into things. They were little accidents, but they were frequent. Jessica’s husband wasn’t from Parán and the situation was very concerning for him.

[Jessica]: I told him: “No, if we are going to be together we need to be patient with him because my mom already told me, your son is going to turn out like…like your uncle,” she told me that.  

[Marco]: Jessica had three brothers who were going blind. Her husband thought it was a problem with their diet but she knew it wasn’t. Jessica could tell her husband didn’t support her. She felt alone, hurt, and irritated.

[Jessica]: So I made a decision. I said: “What kind of future am I going to have with this man? He doesn’t understand my son” …of course, he didn’t hit me, but he was, he was a, how can I put it, he wasn’t…he wasn’t a good father, you understand? That’s why I left him…He didn’t understand me, you know?

[Marco]: Jessica remarried at the age of 23. Now she’s 30 and she makes her living selling food at a little stand by the new highway. She laughs a lot and she likes joking around with people.

We spoke with Jessica at her mother’s house. She invited us to sit in what, she says, is the most comfortable part of the house: the bedroom belonging to her brothers who are going blind.

There was a mattress, some straw hats decorated with plastic carnations, and a picture of a little girl in a metal frame. We sat down. Jessica tried to explain what life is like with a child who will go blind in a few years, with her son Lucho.

[Jessica]: They can’t see at night… When the sun sets, that’s when the boys who don’t see start to worry… they come from far away, where they are, that’s when they come running home.

[Marco]: Because for children like Lucho, the darkness is thicker. After sun sets, other children’s eyes adjust to artificial light.

But for Lucho and children like him, the things they see during the day become invisible when night falls. Even when they’re lit by street lights, it’s all the same, their eyes don’t see. And everywhere they play during the day suddenly becomes dangerous.

Parán is a collection of elevated houses in the middle of the peaks and gorges of the Andes mountain range. The streets run between steep and rocky slopes. It is hard to walk there for people who can see. Imagine what it’s like when you can’t.

Not really knowing what’s going on—and with no solution— parents like Jessica teach their children to come home before it gets dark. It’s no wonder. You hear stories about blind people who have died from falling off the cliffs.

[Jessica]: When I come home, I worry. “Where could my son be?” It’s because they’re kids, you know? They’re having fun with their friends, they get caught up playing and then they can’t make it home, so I worry.

I have to come quickly to see if he’s made it home, if he doesn’t come home I have to go out and look for him…

[Marco]: That’s how things were. Some young people started going blind, and the village adapted. And no one knew why. Until 2012, when everything changed.  

A mining company started exploring the hills surrounding Parán. The company wanted to get in the town’s good graces. They hired an NGO to find out what their neighbors might need. A doctor from that NGO noticed that a lot of children in the village needed glasses. So then they brought an ophthalmologist to Parán. But when the doctors examined the children, they discovered that it was no simple myopia that was keeping them from reading the board at school. No. What the village already thought was normal—blindness in so many of their men— was extraordinary to the doctors.

The doctors took samples and after running DNA tests they understood that it had to do with a genetic disorder called Retinitis Pigmentosa. It’s caused by a mutation on the X-chromosome, so woman carry the illness but men suffer the symptoms. That’s why they’re the only ones that go blind.

Those who suffer Retinitis Pigmentosa are born seeing correctly. But over time, their retinal tissue atrophies. The retinal cells start slowly dying, as if they were pixels going out on a computer screen. If we imagine that the retina is a circle, they cells dies from the edges of the circle moving inward. The visual fields narrows as if it were tunnel. Or how black and white TV show end by becoming a point on the screen.

Night blindness is the first sign. And as it progresses the visual field disappears until the person only sees white. Not black, just white. As if they were trapped in the clouds.

What’s happens in Parán is very strange. One in ten men has the illness.

To put it another way: Parán is the place with the highest rate of this illness in the world.

[Astedia]: It… it has to do with something being passed down, according to what they say.

[Marco]: This is Astedia, Jessica’s mother. She’s Luchito’s grandmother, the boy who’s going blind. And this is how she understands what’s happening to her grandson.

[Astedia]: It’s like…a running vein that hides. This, it’s… Like something that is inherited, that’s why it’s increasing. That’s how they explained it.

[Marco]: That “they” refers to the doctors who at one point came through Parán. And clearly these professionals didn’t manage to properly explain to the village the cause of the blindness. But what Astedia —and the rest of Parán— did understand was that women carry the disease. They’re the ones who transmit the illness to their sons.

[Astedia]: It’s a nice village and all, but what does that matter? That’s our inheritance here…It’s really sad, lamentable really. Pain…because our sons, our descendants, for example, my grandsons are going to keep on being like this, it’s sad too…

[Marco]: Astedia and many women in the village feel that maybe they would be better off not knowing. Better off not having an explanation. Now, she says, they feel guilty.

[Marco]: The news that Parán was the “village of the blind” made it to Lima, and concerned people decided to send help in the form of provisions.

[Flores]: Pasta, rice, milk, blankets…

[Marco]: This is Flores, Astedia’s husband. 

[Marco]: Even though it sounds unbelievable, it was the provisions that caused a lot of problems in Parán.

Everyone wanted their share. Blind or not. A lot of Parán’s residents needed a blanket. People in the town had gotten so used to their neighbor’s blindness, they didn’t understand why they weren’t distributing the provisions equitably.  

[Flores]: So they started meeting on the same street, all of the women stood in line. Then…  There’s a lady, her daughter works there, she’s a bigger lady who’s wearing a red shirt. She said: “If you’re going to give this stuff out, give it to everyone or no one,” she said. But I told her: “Look, I told you, this comes for the disabled only.” 

[Marco]: Things got tense. There was a pastor in charge of distributing everything. He was wearing glasses. Flores says the woman went up to the pastor and told him to leave or she would take his glasses.

[Flores]: That’s what she said. And so I said to her: “You already have that. What more do you want?” That’s what I said to her… So during all that, she pushed me, from where I am, she pushed me like this…

[Marco]: Flores fell on the woman. And from there everything fell into chaos. The people of Parán refer to that day as the “provisions incident.” And it may not sound like a big altercation, but for this village which is normally peaceful, it was. It became a crucial moment.

Since then no one has gone back to help Parán. The doctors stopped coming and so did the provisions. Nothing came. Dr. Ricardo Fujita, one of the doctors that visited Parán told us that the doctors didn’t go back because they didn’t have the resources. But the people of Parán see it differently.  They feel abandoned.

Most of the neighbors in the village are evangelical. Flores is too. And he believes that if he and his wife show that they truly have faith, God will send a cure.

[Flores]: Of course, but like I’m telling you, you have to have faith. You have to have enough faith and the Lord heals us. You practically have to cry enough, ask the Lord crying to heal us. And that’s why now I’m telling my wife: “We need to pray enough and we need to fast enough.” But right now like, like I’m telling you, I’m going to do everything possible to sit down with someone from Congress to ask for help.

[Marco]: But what is clear is, the way the doctors see it, things didn’t get better, but worse. Journalists wrote reports in newspapers, radio and TV. Word spread to neighboring villages.

Stories about the blindness were not always told in a good way. In the reports, Parán was a cursed village, punished by God and they even insinuated that the illness is a result of marriages between siblings and cousins.

These rumors have made people in other villages start to look down on Parán.

Some even refuse to buy the peaches the village produces. They’re convinced they’ll go blind if they eat them. Others avoid anything that comes from the village. And the rumors never cease.

This is Jessica:

[Jessica]: Sometimes, in the community, in the district, it’s our turn to hold championships here… a game or an event here, and they come from different villages and they discriminate against our kids. They say “Look at that one, that one can’t see,” that’s how they say it, they discriminate against them mostly…

[Marco]: Even Flores thinks that way, despite the fact that he seems to really love Parán. His sons are losing their sight and he, somehow, has accepted their blindness. But he has started thinking that the place is cursed. He mentioned a recent drought to us that affected the peach orchard and according to him, all of it is connected.

[Flores]: Because there’s a lot of blindness here. Then there’s no water. I mean Parán, it says in the Bible that Paran was a desert. Nothing grows, nothing. Rocks. There was definitely something here before. And that’s why, as they say, that punishment came here. 

[Marco]: During our last day in Parán, Jessica is selling food on the side of the highway. In the village, her son Lucho is playing with his cousin Abiel.

Not long ago they found a nest and took a hatchling from it. Their grandmother Astedia made them put it back in the nest. Now we’re trying to guess what kind of bird it is.

[Lucho y Abiel]: Like an eagle…a falcon…a turkey vulture… a condor, condors eat rotten meat.

[Marco]: All of a sudden, Lucho stands up, starts running and disappears around the corner.

[Abiel]: Lucho’s going singing…

[Marco]: Did he already leave?

[Abiel]: Yeah, Lucho’s going singing…

[Marco]: Call him, call him.

[Marco]: But Lucho is already running home. While we were talking about the bird, the daylight started to fade and Lucho’s vision with it. He did what his mother taught him: run home and try to get there before it gets completely dark, when he can’t see anything anymore.

Now Abiel is running after Lucho. When we reach him, the two boys are in front of Jessica’s house, hiding under a wheelbarrow.

Then they get on top of it and look toward the mountains. As it gets dark, Lucho stops talking. We ask him how far he can see…

[Lucho]: I don’t see anything, all I see is the hill painted black, black…

[Marco]: Do you see that bucket?

[Lucho]: White, I don’t see it, just white…

[Marco]: Do you see me?

[Lucho]: Yes… but I don’t see your expression anymore… I can’t see your face…

[Marco]: No…

Lucho looks toward the mountains with a lost expression as the last rays of light disappeared. He looks lost in the dark. His cousin Abiel, however, gets more agitated and starts talking. He knows that the blindness was what brought us to Parán. And he tries to help us. Even though he doesn’t have any problems with his eyes, he closes his eyes and tells us he can’t see either.

[Daniel]: When we first aired this story in 2014, it was still believed that Retinitis Pigmentosa was an irreversible condition. But now, that could change. The University of Pennsylvania is developing a genetic treatment to help boys like Lucho who still haven’t completely lost their vision. The treatment is in an experimental phase and we still don’t know if it’s going to work, but it’s an important step and it could change the outlook for people with this condition.

Marco Avilés es periodista peruano y profesor en el Mount Holyoke College y doctor en literatura por la Universidad de Pensilvania. Annie Avilés es periodista y editora de podcasts. Esta historia fue editada por Camila Segura y por mi. La mezcla y el diseño de sonido son de Andrés Azpiri. 

We’ll take a quick break and come back with our last story.

[Daniel]: We’re back. This is Radio Ambulante. And in today’s last story, we go back to Arequipa with my dad. Back to that childhood we remembered while walking through the streets of Miraflores. It’s a story about love he passed down to me, and that we still share to this day: soccer, and radio…

[Daniel]: My father Renato grew up in Arequipa, Peru, in the 1950s. Like almost every kid at the time, he was obsessed with soccer. But my old man was different. What he loved most wasn’t playing—it was broadcasting the games. Back then, soccer was everywhere.

[Renato]: In the streets, in the alleys of the neighborhoods, on dirt patches, on fields of scraggly grass, at some schools that had a fairly big sports field, at schools, at institutes, at universities, at factories…

[Daniel]: And at Estadio Melgar, where I went with my grandfather every Sunday. At halftime, he’d walk over to the press box, and lean in to listen to the commentators.

[Renato]: So I’d listen to them and I basically started imitating them, imagining matches with my friends in the schoolyard, at school.

[Daniel]: He’d spend afternoons after school with a microphone hooked up to a little speaker, narrating the pickup games his friends played. Little by little he became known around the neighborhood. His broadcasts gave a certain glamour to what was really just a simple neighborhood match. And if you think that’s easy, try it. Go to the stadium. Try describing how 22 players position themselves on a huge field. Try predicting where a play is headed. Try conveying, with nothing but words, the desperation of a shot that hits the post. My old man was good at it. Sometimes, he’d even make up entire matches.

[Renato]: I’d already become a kind of entertainment for the adults in the family, me broadcasting matches at home.

[Daniel]: There’s a scene from those years, one that’s stuck with me. It happened at the Cine Teatro in Mollendo, Peru, a beach town about four hours from Arequipa. Now picture a summer night in 1955. My grandfather’s brother, Uncle Juan Castor, had organized what he called a literary-musical evening.

[Renato]: People came to see musical groups, dance groups, singers, poets… And my uncle, Juan Castor, tells me: Renato, or Renatito, I’d like you, as part of the show, to broadcast a match. Hold on, I told him. How does that work?

[Daniel]: Simple. Just like he did at teatime. Just like he did on the field behind the school. Except now, his uncle wanted him to make up a match in front of more than 300 people. Something he’d never done, something he hadn’t even considered.

[Renato]: In the audience were my parents, my siblings, friends of my aunts and uncles, and of course, the place was packed. And there in the middle of it, there was nothing else on stage, just a microphone. And I walked out, stood in the center, and started broadcasting a match…

[Daniel]: If all of this sounds far-fetched to you, you have to remember the times. There was no television. If you weren’t at the stadium, you depended on a radio announcer. Everyone was used to enjoying soccer blind.

[Daniel]: In that packed, silent auditorium in Mollendo, everyone followed the play this kid—my father—was making up, as if it were real.

[Daniel]: And then, when the key moment of that imaginary match arrived…

[Renato]: Castillo to Rivera. Rivera to Drago. Drago to Gómez Sánchez. Gómez Sánchez shoots. Ball to the center. Palomita Rivera jumps and goooal. Goooal for Peru. Goooooal!

[Daniel]: The whole audience jumped to their feet, kids and adults shouting about this beautiful Peruvian goal. People were hugging each other, clapping each other on the back, congratulating one another.

[Renato]: For me, the most extraordinary part of it is that the moment I said “goal,” the audience shouted like they were actually at the stadium.

[Daniel]: And when he stepped off the stage, there was Uncle Juan Castor, crying with emotion.

[Daniel]: The piece you just heard is called “Imaginary Soccer,” and it was written by me. On our website we’ll leave you an old video of my dad, Renato, narrating an imaginary soccer match live. The mix is by Andrés Azpiri, with music by Remy Lozano, Ana Tuirán, and Andrés.

The rest of the Radio Ambulante team includes Paola Alean, Adriana Bernal, Aneris Casassus, Diego Corzo, Emilia Erbetta, Camilo Jiménez Santofimio, Germán Montoya, Sara Selva Ortiz, Samantha Proaño, Natalia Ramírez, Juan Pablo Santos, Bruno Scelza, Camila Segura, David Trujillo, Elsa Liliana Ulloa, Luis Fernando Vargas, Franklin Villavicencio, and Mariana Zúñiga.

Carolina Guerrero is the CEO.

Radio Ambulante is a podcast from Radio Ambulante Studios; it’s produced and mixed on Hindenburg PRO.

If you enjoyed this episode and want us to keep making independent journalism about Latin America, support us through Deambulantes, our membership program. Visit radioambulante.org/donar and help us keep telling the region’s stories.

And, well, for the next few weeks we won’t be publishing episodes on Tuesdays. We’ll be back in September with our 16th season. I can already tell you the episodes we’re working on are amazing. We can’t wait for you to hear them.

In the meantime, I’ll ask you a favor: if you liked this episode, or any episode this season, please share it with a friend, a family member, your partner… all of that helps us keep growing our audience.

Radio Ambulante tells the stories of Latin America. I’m Daniel Alarcón. Thanks for listening.