To the Fenix Who Commanded Authority
You stood alone on a street corner in Lima. Or you would’ve been alone, if it wasn’t for us, talking loudly and walking slowly down the residential streets of Lima’s Miraflores neighborhood. It was April, my first evening in Lima, and we were hot. My fiancé and I had left our long pants in Brooklyn and were already sunburned by the time we saw you.
“She’s a Fenix,” our friend and host, Pilii, explained—a member of an all-female police force tasked with patrolling Lima’s streets. Your tall dark boots and khakis made you look like an equestrian, if it wasn’t for the dark police vest you had slung across your chest.
Your organization, the “Escuadron Fenix,” was formed in the 1990s to help heal corruption that plagued the police force in Peru. It was assumed by the administration who formed the squad in ‘98 that women would be less inclined to accept bribes from motorists, less likely to do favors for drivers than policeman on the force. While there hasn’t been solid data showing women accept roadside bribes less often than their male counterparts, it’s remained women’s work to direct traffic in Peru—and the traffic, from what I’d already seen, was badly in need of directing. On a nearby commercial street painted traffic lines were treated more like charming suggestions than strict rules to be observed, and our ears still rang from blaring horns two blocks away. Where we found you, though, there was no traffic to direct. We locked eyes. You stood quiet.
Now, I am no stranger to women in uniform (I went to Catholic girl school for eight years), but I am unfamiliar with a uniform so distinctly female and commanding. Your boots, high. Your pants, snug. Your hair, pulled in a bun so tight I could feel your headache. On that street corner in Miraflores you projected an authority I doubt I will ever possess, which is problematic for me because I teach high school English.
It was teaching, in part, that brought me to you. I came to Peru to visit our friend and to take the kind of spring break that I hoped might heal the months that came before it. First year teaching was hard, and I was tired of losing sleep, and losing weight, and losing patience, exhausted by the inexhaustible voice that said “you could be grading” each time I put down my pen.
“I thought of your stoic prepossession and wondered why you were alone. I knew it was your job to patrol the streets, but the street we were on was empty. There was no needy motorist. No car accident in sight. What, Fenix, were you doing?”
It wasn’t the amount of work but the type that made it challenging. I could keep up with parent phone calls, and make-up work, and lesson plans, and revisions, and copies to make on copiers that work except for when you need them. It was harder to do the emotional work of being an adult to teenagers who need one, to learn how to care for students while not letting them off the hook. Before each of my classes my stomach twisted like it was full of butterflies with wings made out of razors.
In Peru, though, I would get better. In Peru, I’d eat ceviche. In Peru, I’d wear shirts that weren’t covered in pen stains and read books (for fun!) on the beach. I’d return to school, one week later, a better teacher, a better person, and wearing an Incan sweater, with a reserve of patience and presence that’d last me until the end of the year.
That night in Miraflores, we didn’t stop to speak with you. Home held the promise of dinner so we kept walking, past a park with pink flowers and a statue of the Madonna, by brick walls that still held heat from the quickly setting sun. It’d sunk by the time we arrived at home—happy, hungry, and sweating.
Still, I thought of your stoic prepossession and wondered why you were alone. I knew it was your job to patrol the streets, but the street we were on was empty. There was no needy motorist. No car accident in sight. What, Fenix, were you doing?
The next day we became those motorists, travelling to the mountains and to the coast and to a vineyard hours away, to Chancay, and Azpitia and Punta Hermosa Beach. I looked for you en route each time, and asked “is she a Fenix?” each time I saw a woman in tall boots.
By the last day of our trip, we’d done all our Break things. I’d eaten lomo saltado on a blanket while sipping cold chilcanos, watched waves off the Pacific coast and took long, happy naps. And my classroom in Brooklyn felt as far away as the clouds we watched above the ocean; my stack of ungraded essays as distant as those surfers down the shore. I read three books. I ate ceviche. I was well-rested, dammit, so why was I not ready to return?
I thought of you then, Fenix, your moment of pisco-less peace—on the job, on a street corner, away from crashing cars. I do not want to speak for you or lend you a false meaning, but when I saw you I saw a woman unafraid of her power and unafraid to rest, two things that scared me equally for inverse, twisted, reasons. And I wondered what it would look like if I did that for myself, if I didn’t save up rehabilitating for a nine day sprint to save sanity, but took time to breath when the butterflies appeared, trusted my gut, and stopped moving.
I wondered if the work of vacation is less important, less essential, than the kind of break you took, on a street corner, on the job, in the daily in between. You paused for a moment when the sun was setting in the company of pink flowers, before mounting your motorcycle and returning to the road.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Header photo by Eduardo Flores
