The Bolivian secret of looking youthful

WARNING: Do not read this post if you don´t like reading about bodily fuids.

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.