Short Story: An Incomplete Guide on Subduing Your Opponents: Incas, Lovers, and Rapists

Above:  The Author in 2006 at a makeshift Zoo on the edge of the Peruvian            Amazon 3 days after his first brawl in Lima


In June of 2005 I sold my house, quit my job, sold or gave away everything I owned, and left Durham, North Carolina to study Spanish in Quito, Ecuador. It was all part of a plan to get far away from my despised career path and trek as deep as I dare into the Amazon jungle. After seven months in Quito, in an intensive one-on-one Spanish language course, I found myself with nothing more to study and an expired tourist visa. I broke south to Perú to pick up a visa extension for Ecuador intending to return and delve into the Amazon there. However, things didn't start as expected. I wrote this account two years ago in an attempt not only to catalog what I'd done (as my family and some friends have advised) but also to make sense of what happened.  *names have been changed.


Todd A. Levins


"The years thunder by. The dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it the tomb is sealed. Where, then, lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be:  Bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?" Sterling Hayden, from his book: Wanderer



Gabriela first jerked my eyes toward her from a tree-stump barstool where I sat alone. “Jesus,” I mumbled to myself, or as the locals say, Fuck her mother. She sauntered in from the town's only paved road.  She had a deep-veined beauty and a gutsy laugh that showed off her fat white teeth.  Picture this: your favorite watering hole; now shrink it, replace the floor with sand, remove the front wall entirely, raise the temperature to fever level, drop two reggae blasting, loudspeakers in each corner, and plop a fire juggling hippie at the entrance. Just after dusk Gabriela came in with a six-and-a-half foot Adonis with a surfer's chest and shoulders—who may or may not have been shirtless ( I can't be sure. It wasn't him I was watching.). The two of them had nothing but the entire bar's untarnished attention—mine, the dancing middle-aged couple, and the two others seated along the bar. Gabriela promptly challenged the gangly eighteen year-old male bartender to an arm wrestling match for a pack of cigarettes and two beers. I couldn't have taken my eyes off her were they plucked from my head.
I'm your average white upper middle class North American male: raised in the suburbs with a country club membership, and an L.L. Bean bed for the Labrador Retriever. Among my hobbies I've counted beer swilling till black-out, automotive motor repair, and exploring tropical jungles. Most recently I've been exploring Peru.
Peru is a great place to delve into the Amazon rain forest, bone up on your pickpocketing defenses, and if your not careful, get drugged and robbed (Or if you're female, much worse.). It's an ideal place to have a drunk driving accident, provided you're willing to appease the person you've hit by taking them around the corner to “suck” some beers. It's also a good place to score magic potions or strip all the nearby coconut trees of fruit while your bus is stuck for two days between landslides in torrential Andean downpours.
Lest I paint too sinister a portrait, consider this: Peru is chock full of delectable fruits, and syrupy desserts. It has stunning mountains, forests, and beaches (with huge curling surfer-waves), and honey-skinned gorgeous people who will invite you into their hearts and homes without hesitation. I met Gabriela there.
After finishing a seven month Spanish course in Ecuador I found myself in the tiny beach town of Mancora, on the northern Peruvian coast, the same coast that Francisco Pizarro and his band of Spanish ruffians landed nearly 500 years earlier in a frenzy over rumors of a vast inland empire constructed of cities gilded in gold. What I couldn't have know then—what none of us can know when it happens for that matter—is that like a select few people in each of our lives, Gabriela heralded something. In this case that something was violence. I learned to brawl there in Peru—at the age of 36—and I imported it back to the home of the brave, the birthplace of touchdowns and modern cage fighting. It didn't go over well.
Twenty-two months after my first street brawl in Lima I awoke from a beer black-out on a concrete floored Durham, North Carolina jail cell
Sitting alone at the bar and trying to ease out of a spiteful hangover, I watched Gabriela, who like some sly grifter, beat the bartender in the arm wrestling match. When she won we all cheered (louder than we thought we would) and sooner than later I found myself chatting her up and vowing never to leave her side.
Our conversation went something like this:
“You're here alone?” she asked.
“I came to pick up an extension on my Ecuadorian visa so that my girlfriend and I could see the Galapagos Islands.”
“That's nice.”
“I couldn't think of a worse tourist trap.”
“I'd love to go.”
“Well not me, and I'm a biologist. Anyway, she refuses to come now.”
“I'm sorry.”
“Don't be,” I smiled. My girlfriend's cancellation couldn't have been more opportune.
“Doesn't she miss you?”
“She says I'm a selfish womanizer, and those are compliments.”
“Are you?”
“I'm not always selfish.”
Adonis was gesticulating wildly from the back of a three-wheeled taxi idling at the entrance. Next, I clearly remember saying in an earnest and desperate voice, “Please don't ever leave me.”  Then she left me.
Three days later, I sat in a road-side Internet café in Mancora and fired off a few last minute emails before I was to flag down a mini-van heading north for Ecuador, leaving behind Peru and Gabriela forever. Except that was the moment I spotted her on the side of the road, waving goodbye to Adonis, his face bulging against the smoked glass of the double-decker bus—one heading north to the port where planes leave for the Galapagos Islands.
We spent the remainder of the day in a dream: eating ceviche—a succulent citrus salsa and raw fish dish—, throwing snow-cones at one another, and dancing to blasting reggaeton while drinking Cuba Libres and beer. We sat on the beach watching surfers slip down steep waves. I walked to the edge alone and waded into the surf. I swam a butterfly stroke diving into the sides of the towering waves and hoping that Gabriela would think my tanned back broad and manly. After a short swim I climbed the beach. Gabriela lay face-up, sunbathing. I stood above her dripping seawater onto her molasses skin, and silky hair, black as if all the colors of the spectrum were jammed in too tight a space. She flicked open an eye. “The butterfly's left the water, huh?” She began to howl. “How's my little butterfly?” All night it was butterfly this and butterfly that. She told anybody who would listen, imploring me to mime how I tried to woo her with the butterfly stroke. I laughed with her and felt an overwhelming connection that inspired me to vow my love for her. Maybe it was easier for me, in a second language, and especially one in which I love you, and I want you, is spoken identically, differentiated only by context. We traveled south eighteen hours by bus and I moved into her austere two bedroom apartment in Lima with her brother, Jorge, her daughter, and her nanny (All mothers have nannies in Peru, unless of course you're indigenous, then you are the nanny). Like any self-respecting Peruvian she opened her life to me. We spent the next nineteen days together, separating only to shower, scratch that, only when I took her four year-old daughter to the market to give Gabriela a few minutes alone. She worked a couple days a week for a modeling agency promoting beer or cigarettes and I had money saved from years of corporate drudgery in North Carolina. Mostly we relaxed at her city apartment or on the outskirts of Lima at her mother's house, seven of us in a single bathroom, seven hundred square foot concrete bungalow with a collapsing bamboo-roofed porch. It never felt cramped. I'd gobble down her mother's cooking all day and sleep in her teenage brother's bed bouncing him to a hammock in the front yard. Occasionally Gabriela's lawyer would come by and they'd retire to the kitchen to speak in foreboding low tones. He was a creepy overfed toad but he represented Gabriela in her case against her daughter's father, a man who'd once trained the laser sighting of his pistol on her chest. (Gabriela had responded by jumping from a second story window and spent three days in the hospital with a compressed vertebrae.)
Twenty-six years-old, five-and-a-half feet tall, slender, and with a temper that could flash like a summer squall, Gabriela became my fighting inspiration. I don't mean some Mr. Miagi wax-on wax-off bullshit, I mean the face that floats in the black-hole void of your mind goading you while you're trying to pound some imbecile unconscious, the reason you're risking your skin in the first place. In my case, at least up until the end, it was Gabriela's almond eyes, soft cheeks, and Monroesque lip-mole that hung in my mind's eye.
She gave me my first fight opportunity a few blocks from the largest black market in the largest city of a country thick with thieves. We were in a dance club, a cavernous balconied hall jammed with two-hundred drunk, sweaty Peruvians below an eight-piece band blowing “angry salsa”. The mass danced fervently on a floor strewn with broken beer bottles. At the end of the night Gabriela, her brother Jorge, and I made our way to the exit together. But Jorge shimmied ahead of us, through the throngs. When Gabriela and I approached the exit we found him just inside a set of double doors surrounded by five or six men who were shouting at him. Next he disappeared behind a wall of fists. A force compelled me to demonstrate my loyalty to Gabriela and her family, and without thinking I waded in next to Jorge and started swinging. Immediately a line-backer sized bouncer seized me from behind in a full-nelson, and fists rained on my skull. My arms twisted, and with my feet busy balancing me, I was left to tuck and bob. By the time the bouncer tossed me down the exit stairs my left eye was swollen half shut.

This happened around this time my American ex-girlfriend began invading my dreams. I'd awake next to Gabriela but yearning to hold the woman I'd left. It made me anxious for movement. “I'm going to the Amazon jungle,” I eventually told Gabriela.
“When will you return?”
“Just a couple months.”
“Two whole months?”
“It'll pass quickly,” I said.
I felt relieved to be on my own again, adventuring and free. I made my way east toward the Amazon basin, organized and completed a six day hike down a coffee-route mule trail from the Andean foothills into the edge of the jungle, to the lost city of the Incas, Espiritu Pampa (Ghost Plain), the final Inca holdout subdued by the Spaniards nearly forty years after they landed north near Mancora.



When Francisco Pizarro made landfall he discovered the Inca empire was in the clutches of a war of succession. The Incas had been on an incredible run. In the preceding eighty years they went from a handful of tribes in what's now southern Peru to being the largest empire in the hemisphere, stretching from present day Colombia in the north all the way to central Chile in the south. (That's the same as Key West to Northern Ontario). When Pizarro arrived the fledgling empire seemed to hang in the balance between the recently deceased king's two sons: Atahualpa in the north in Quito, and Huascar in the south in Cusco—both claimed the crown. But it was Pizarro and his motley band of mercenaries and horses sniffing along behind stories of gold that truly held the fate of the empire. Atahualpa's armies marched south along the spine of the Andes and eventually vanquished his brother. On his victory stroll south to claim the throne and with an army of 90,000 he began receiving reports of funny metal-clad, white men with hair on their faces, and perched on strange animals. The men were taking slaves and fomenting resistance among the conquered tribes. Atahualpa invited Pizarro and his band to Cajamarca, a town where the Incas had built elaborate pools around hot springs. Atahualpa encamped in the hills outside of town and enjoyed the baths and concubines. He sent word that he would meet with Pizarro, but Atahualpa was unimpressed and made Pizarro wait many days. A friar traveling with Pizarro recorded the events, saying that with each passing night Pizarro's band of less than 200 soldiers holed up in town grew increasingly tense watching the twinkling hillsides alight with the fires of tens of thousands of Inca warriors. (I always liked that part of the story, the image of this massive, savage army blanketing the hillsides.)  Anyway, Atahualpa finally went to meet the rabble rouser; he came on a litter borne by more than fifty lords and with an elite security force of 5,000 warriors.
A few days after my hike to the last Inca city I was resting in a nearby jungle town, Quillabamba, when I opened an email from Gabriela telling me to call her right away. Under starlight I dialed her from a pay phone in the deserted town square. While weeping she told me what had happened. She'd been out the night before, with a group of friends (that included her lawyer) at a discotheque but had awoken naked in a hotel room with the toad lawyer, the one handling her child support case. She only remembered having two drinks at the discotheque but the toad claimed that she had gotten drunk and had lost her apartment keys, that he did her a favor by taking her to a hotel. He said she'd stripped herself naked. Neither Gabriela nor I believed that bullshit. He'd drugged and raped her and we both knew it.
I felt as empty as a corn husk. I was a three-day bus ride from her. But she insisted that I not return, that I could do nothing now but offer sympathy. “It will only be a few more weeks before you're back, right?” she said.
“Yeah.” I didn't tell her of my idea to continue exploring east into Bolivia. Week long Amazonian hikes and river descents, living and camping in the jungle, and wandering along jungle fringe towns with everything I needed on my back was filling me full with a feeling of the immediacy of life: one with intense human connections and a sublime repoire with nature. Whereas talking through a tinny phone line to Gabriela and trying to sidestep her demands for my speedy return always deflated me by the calls end. I knew I had mistaken my initial feelings of excitement for love so I didn't debate long between a journey back or one ahead, penetrating the green Amazon.
"A man of knowledge lives by acting not by thinking about acting." Carlos Castaneda
Two nights later, taking a dance break outside at the only discotheque in Quillabamba, I pushed up to a woman cooking beef-heart kabobs on the sidewalk and ordered one. She was chatting with the women vendors next to her when a stout man rushed up and began shouting in her face. The topic was long ago overshadowed by what happened next:  I reached out to take my kabob when the man whaled her with a meaty fist, sending her stumbling backwards, all but to the ground. I jerked to look at a man beside me, also a witness. I gave him what could have only been and incredulous look that turned into a request for help.  He shook his head and turned his eyes to the ground.
I turned to the attacker. “Why don't you try someone who can punch back?”
His eyes speared me and he reached for me over the orange coals, inviting me to fight. I stepped back. What happened next is murky but I remember arguing with my friend, my hiking guide. He pleaded for me to forget it, that the man's buddies were nearby and they likely were carrying knives. What I do remember clearly is the sickening feeling of a coward, being witness to unprovoked misogynist violence, and doing nothing about it. I felt castrated. I hardly slept that night. What would Gabriela have thought of me? In my cramped hotel room I vowed, over and over, that if I ever again saw a man abuse a woman I would act, not think.
A week later, outside the very same discotheque and in and out of the gray edges of a rum  black-out I was alone with a skinny man in an unlit alleyway. (Likely he was as drunk as I.) For some reason I went after him kicking and punching. Eventually a cop pulled me from him. I tried to cull some sort of pride from the incident, some sort of feeling that I must have punished a violent chauvinist. But the truth was I couldn't recall what started the fight anymore than I could recall my own birth. One thing did stick with me: the man scurrying wide-eyed backwards down the cobble-stone street with myself in pursuit windmilling and kicking.
A few days later while watching cock fights something dawned on me, and it seems simple now to say—embarrassing even. As the maroon and tawny feathers danced above the fighting roosters and the Peruvians jumped and shouted in the stands circumscribing the ring, I realized that those fights were largely determined by the better fighter, the one with better training, better genes. The birds were set down and knew what to expect—exactly the way it never happens in real life. Francisco Pizarro used Atahualpa's burgeoning hubris and the latest technology (gunpowder) against him, and I, under the sway of misplaced anger foisted onto some sorry chump leaving a discotheque, had completely surprised him. He had no idea what to expect from this thin, blue-eyed gringo. All he could do was retreat.
After seven months in the Peruvian and Bolivian Amazon I relented under Gabriela's pleas and returned to her, to Lima, that dirty city lying beneath slow, miserable clouds, for what I described in a notebook a month later, as “twenty-three days of what I detest—a long goodbye”. She forbade me to speak of the drugging and rape by her lawyer. She hinted at marriage and I only felt a hollow space.
We took a trip north, along the coast to pre-Incan civilizations, adobe-builders whose villages long ago melted into the desert, but whose filigreed gold jewelery now lies encased behind museum glass. One night Gabriela and I met some wayfaring Peruvian hippies selling selling hemp necklaces. We sat down around a beach drift-wood fire and passed a bottle of rum and a bag of cocaine (which I snorted and Gabriela refused). She insisted that I go back to the hotel three blocks away and retrieve my guitar and, exuberantly high, I did—only to later realize the obvious: that I'd left her with four drooling hyenas. (Authorial note: Only once have I seen a hyena. And guess what. It was drooling!). I raced back relieved to find Gabriela sitting where she'd been the firelight still flickering over her face. I began strumming my guitar and was mid-way through my first song when I noticed how drunk she'd become in my short absence. When a skinny, long haired one grabbed her arm and pulled her up and along the beach I dropped the guitar and chased after them. He claimed they were going to search for more rum and advised me to stay put, that the others were thieves and would steal my guitar, I told him they could have my damn guitar! I snatched her up and carried her fire-man style. While I stumbled through soft sand she kicked and punched me all the way back to the hotel room where she fell unconscious. The next morning she told me how, immediately after I'd left, they'd pressed shots to her lips, laughing, and pouring the rum into her mouth, half of it dribbling down her neck. Neither of us doubted the goal of the man who'd begun dragging her off.
A few weeks later back in Lima Gabriela waited for me outside of a cousin's apartment party. Under the yellow glow of a street lamp she sat on a low concrete wall looking at a cracked sidewalk. When I came out of the door she looked up at me with confused eyes and raw, lipstick smeared lips. What happened, I asked.
“Some guy,” she said, “asked me for directions, but when I started to give them he grabbed me, jammed his tongue in my mouth, and felt me up. He pushed me down right here onto this wall.”
“Who? Who did it!”
She pointed languidly to three men strolling down the sidewalk fifty yards away. My jaw locked and I spun in tight circles wondering how to handle three men. Then Jorge burst from the front door, beer in hand.
“Follow me,” I told him and stalked down the sidewalk. “Hey!”
The three looked back to us. These weren't stunted Hispanics. They were potato-stuffed Limeños.
“Which one of you sons of a whore kissed my girlfriend?” I said while unbuttoning my shirt.
Now it may seem that I was giving away my element of surprise, as it's called, and even now, writing it, that seems the case. Or possibly I was savoring each moment before the maelstrom. Regardless, surprise that comes with an aggressive offense can be so shocking that people can't compute it, even given ample warning; just as Atahualpa could not conceive the threat apparent in Pizarro and his group of militant invaders.
 When Atahualpa refused to surrender in Cajamarca's town square, Pizarro unleashed a thunderous cannon and musket assault. Legend holds that Athualpa's soldiers were so overcome with terror that they brought down an entire side of the city plaza, a towering, foot-thick stone wall.
The three Limeños could have easily pounded me down but instead the two men on the sides pivoted and, as if directed, pointed, at the man in the middle. Maybe guilt drove them. I went from button to button down my shirt. Nobody fled, not while I removed my shirt and in a calm voice told the center man that I was going to tear him apart.
There's a magical moment in any fist fight. It's when the fear for one's own wellbeing disappears. It usually happens if you're lucky enough to withstand a blow and realize that you're still conscious, still in one piece. But I was already past the magical moment before any fists had flown.
I launched myself at the man and battered him in the ribs, jaw, and cheeks. One punch for the rapist lawyer, a jab for the gun slinging ex-boyfriend, still another for the curbside wife beater. I backed him up twenty or thirty yards pummeling him as he slipped off a heavy-buckled belt and began whipping me with it. His blows bounced off me. By the time the police arrived they had to rip me off of him where he lay on the spot I'd body-slammed him.
Gabriela looked at me differently after that. She said that nobody ever defended her that way. I told her I had no choice.
A week later I found myself eating breakfast in open-air street markets with Gabriela and her daughter or bringing them along as I scoured downtown Lima for books in English. But I was thinking of a slow haul overland, back home to North Carolina. I wondered how she would be without me. To be honest—and I must be, or I'd just be wasting your time with mere entertainment—I'd heard tales of the incomparable beauty and openness of Colombian women and my ambition to conquer had only grown more bold. Gabriela had managed twenty-six years before me, I reasoned, she'd be fine afterwards.  Soon it would be me waving from the tinted bus window.
In the clearing smoke of the abrupt firefight Atahualpa, the king of the largest empire in the hemisphere found himself under the yoke of a few audacious, if not scruffy, newcomers. He pledged to fill his large dungeon prison twice with gold and once with silver, supposedly in exchange for his freedom. He did just that and was given his freedom; it just happened to come after one messy detail: his execution. 

Now you've not been a monarch, captured, and garroted, and maybe you've never even been incarcerated, and good for you! Even so, try imagining this: you've been enjoying a few drinks at your neighborhood bar with friendly, polite conversation, coquettish strangers, idle chat, and bam! the next thing you know you're goddamn face down, handcuffed, crusted in blood, with a hangover raking you scalp to foot. Twenty-two months after my first street brawl in Lima I awoke from a beer black-out on a concrete floored Durham, North Carolina jail cell just that way.
I was kept in solitary for the first 36 hours, the graffiti-laden walls the only reading material aside from my arrest sheet: Misdemeanor injury to real property (a tailor's plate glass store-front window). Misdemeanor resisting a public officer. Felonious assault inflicting serious bodily injury (broken right hand of thirty year-old male). Mostly I walked laps in the cell and reviewed the decisions (or lack thereof) that had put me there. There’d been no surprises. My binge-drinking-black-outs hadn’t snuck up on me. I’d been in jail before; but those instances I could chalk up to youthful antics.
 I’d be out soon and that scared me as much as staying. I never wanted to black-out again but would I? Among my few possessions in the world were two back packs of clothes and the novel I’d been working on since ending my jungle explorations, the one I’d been cockily banking on to fund a career change. It was a junk heap of revisions. My now anemic savings made the possibility of a return to my detested career ever more likely. Even if I could do other work I had no idea what I would like to do. And I’d left the only woman I’d truly loved for an adventure and she’d given up on me by the time I’d returned. (I would have too were I her.).
Two days later in a glass walled conference room in the jail my attorney told me that the man I’d fought was not injured beyond scrapes and bruises. “Look. It was a bar fight. He lost.” He smiled, seeming to be satisfied that he was on the winning side. “Our problem is the witness says you took him by surprise.”
Truly I had needed jail very badly. Not only was it a crisis but a gift. Here’s the thing: jail heralded of the start of a fight. And as in any conflict, from a quarrel to a battle, declaration of war is an easing of tension not a ratcheting of it. Now, not thoughts, but clear actions were prescribed—and the past could offer no guidance. My beer-fueled black-outs were over. I had to start immediately working to stay out of prison.
I put my right elbow on the table, palm open, and smiled at my attorney. “Arm-wrestle you for bail.”***

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