Three Character Sketches

1. My Arequipeña

I’m thinking of a girl: the youngest daughter of the great-great-grandmother of my great-grandmother.

She was born in a house made of white stone blocks with balconies and studded doors, in Real Street, which at the time had a gutter running through it to carry Arequipa’s waste into the River Chilí. It had been quite some time since the hundred or so Spaniards returning from war had founded this city which would see so many priests, lawyers, revolts and conspiracies come and go. It was a city of straight paved roads, intimate squares, elegant houses and innumerable churches. They already called it ‘the white city’, as it had been built from the fire of volcanoes that cools into that docile stone in which every nuance of white is trapped, and which is used as the building blocks of the city’s homes and monuments. It was already the city it would later more fully become: Arequipa, beautiful, pious, unruly.