The main street in Cochabamba is Avenida Heroinas, so-named after the
women who fought to defend the city from Spanish forces in the war of
independence. Where Heroinas meets the second main street Avenida
Ayacucho on one corner there sits the city post office, and next to
it on Heroinas there are a variety of fast food stalls selling
burgers, chinese food, and anticuchos (meat on sticks). On the other
side of the street on the corner there is usually someone selling
DVDs and CDs. One night while accompanying a female friend to her bus
on the corner of Heroinas and Ayacucho we passed a little stall I
hadn't noticed before, at which a man was selling second-hand
American clothes. My friend H was interested in one of the dresses
which was hanging up and got into a conversation with him about where
and how he got the clothes. When he said that he got them from the
port at Iquique (in Chile) H asked if he would be affected by the new
law to bring in stricter regulation on bootlegged goods. He was
dismissive of the idea, saying that he would only have to bribe the
relevant official and he'd be fine. At this I told him about the time
I'd had bribed an official at the Bolivian-Peruvian border in order
to get a 90-day tourist stamp in my passport when he only wanted to
give me 30 days. He told us about how he´d lived in Italy and had
travelled throughout the whole of Europe. “Where are you from?”,
he asked me. “From England”, I told him, “Oh, I haven´t been
there”, he replied. Suddenly the man asked us how old we thought he
was. I made a stab at 40, being suitably generous, but not
excessively so. Looking very pleased with himself, he told us that he
was actually 63, and asked us what we thought his secret must be.
“Staying out of the sun?,” I ventured. He dismissed my guess with
a grin that indicated he thought that his secret was too good for us
to guess. “Semen,” he told us. “Semen?”, I queried. “Yes”,
he said, “you have to spread it on nice and thick, every fifteen
days”, motioning spreading it on his cheeks. I wondered whether the
man was being serious. I asked him the question that occurred most
readily to mind: “this is probably a silly question,” I said,
“but is it your semen or someone else's?”. H laughed. “My own
semen,” he replied, “though you can use someone else's semen, but
you mustn't mix the two together”.
H needed to catch her bus so we said our goodbyes, and were about to
leave, but before doing so H asked him his name. “A. Hitler”, he
said; “Adolf Hitler”. “I'm very rascist”.
He told us that he was there regularly and that we should come back
another day. With that we were on our way, not sure what we could
possibly add to the conversation.
Later I told a couple of friends about what the man had said and they
told me that spreading semen on one´s face, as far as they had
heard, was a surprisingly common ageing solution. I was told that it was not uncommon for women to do the same with their results of their menstruation.
