Feelin' Peru-vy

On the fourteenth floor of an office building on Avenida Benavides in Miraflores is a sleek wooden desk where I’ve spent five of every seven days since arriving in Lima six weeks ago. The desk – my desk – looks out over the lively streets and various edificios of squeaky-clean Miraflores. From this considerable height, I can see the Pacific Ocean on a clear day, but even fourteen floors is not enough to mute the cacophony of screeching brakes and blaring horns below.

The chair at my desk at work is one of the ancient, permanently forward-tilted, rolling variety. A dirty sticker on the back sings its ergonomically-designed praises, but I’m not buying it. Attempted adjustment of the chair revealed that its little gears were inexorably stuck in their present position, endowing the chair with all the flexibility of a boat hull. And it really hurts my back.

After three weeks of dating (and witnessing my back pain), Sam in characteristic generosity surprised me on my birthday last weekend with a stuffed teddy bear and a gift certificate for an hour-long massage at Esther Bella, a local spa. I named the bear Sam, Jr., and instructed the original Sam to make an appointment for the following Saturday.

Saturday arrived, and on the way to the spa I rehearsed the Spanish greeting and few lines I’d planned to make myself sound comfortably bilingual. It didn’t work. I walked confidently up to the receptionist, promptly forgot everything I had memorized and stood there foolishly for a moment. She looked at me expectantly. “Hola”, I said lamely, and thrust the gift certificate at her without another word. She smiled and took it, obviously accustomed to dealing with foreigners, and motioned me to take a seat. A few minutes later I met my “masseuse”.

She was both younger and much shorter than I, a diminutive little thing with a cheerful smile and tiny hands. She indicated that I should follow her up the stairs (“Pasa, señorita!”) and we entered a small, dark chamber with another staircase, this one narrow and spiral-shaped. The first hint of unease began to creep into my consciousness, but I brushed it away. I followed her up the next staircase to an even darker and smaller room above. She handed me an obviously-unwashed robe of thin, blue cotton and managed to intimate that I should go into the bathroom and change.

When I emerged, clutching my bag, shoes and clothing, she was waiting in a room just beyond the bathroom with a translucent sliding glass door. The lights had been dimmed and I could smell incense burning, making the atmosphere faintly romantic. Storage for personal possessions was not immediately apparent, so I piled my things in a heap in the corner by the door and climbed onto the table. With a combination of gestures and unintelligible Spanish, she instructed me to disrobe and lie down. I paused. Take off the robe? Just like that? I am not uncomfortable with nudity or with my own body, but I had the sudden sinking feeling that Sam had paid for much more than what I wanted. The phrase “happy ending” surged incoherently to the front of my thoughts and for one panic-filled second I contemplated a precipitous exit. A moment later, however, my innate writer’s curiosity got the better of me. Slowly, I removed the robe and lay back, completely exposed.

I closed my eyes and waited. She turned on music – strange and highly stylized instrumental versions of 80s pop – and for the first time since leaving my house, I relaxed: “Billie Jean” and “Karma Chameleon” in any form were surely not her way of setting a sexy mood. A sweet but cheap-smelling fragrance filled the air, and a moment later I felt her tentative touch on my instep.

She rubbed my feet lightly, almost distractedly, for several long minutes. Then I heard a faint squirting noise and her hands were on my shins. If I had anticipated a weak, light touch because of her size, I was at least partially wrong. My eyes remained closed as she dug in and made the same stroke over and over: fingers curved around my legs, she pushed down, up and back so many times that it became painful. Every stroke produced a terrible, anguished-sounding “err, eeh” from the table. She did not replenish the oil, but the little that made its way onto my legs was, I’m convinced, lodged forevermore in the follicles. I thought wildly that perhaps she would permanently retard the growth of hair on my legs and I’d never again have to shave.

Not soon enough, she moved to my torso. At least half of the oil she squirted onto her palm landed unnoticed on my right cheek. Still fully uncovered, I braced myself. She moved behind my head and began “massaging” my abdomen. Then, to my utter astonishment, she placed one hand on each of my breasts and squeezed. Hard. Too stunned even to react, I lay inert as she proceeded to trace rapid circles around them with a finger.

At that point, I resigned myself to bearing the pain and discomfort with fortitude and determination to remember every single detail of the experience. Her ministrations were reminiscent more of the awkward fumblings of a well-meaning boyfriend than a professionally-trained masseuse. I kept wondering how much Sam had paid, eventually concluding that for the privilege of such ungoverned abuse she should probably be paying me. At the end, she approached the front of the table, tapped my forehead and, when I opened my eyes, smiled sweetly and sang out, “Finish!”

I sat up slowly, feeling as if I had somehow sustained a full-body rug burn, and noticed without surprise that another client – also completely nude - had been installed on the adjoining table. I glanced around for the blue robe; it was nowhere in sight. After a moment of searching, the masseuse produced it from the floor in the corner beyond the other table and handed it to me triumphantly. There was a dust bunny on the shoulder, two curly black hairs tangled in the fibers at the neck and a yellowish, wet-looking stain at the armpit that I hadn’t noticed before. With a failed attempt at masking my disgust, I took the robe and dropped it on the table beside me. Gathering my aplomb, I walked to the corner, collected my things and made my way to the bathroom, noting in the mirror the ridiculous appearance of my hair: a scalp massage with her oil-covered fingers had rendered my normally straight, fine hair as poufy as a ‘60s beehive.

I was a couple of blocks down Larco before the full comicality of the situation struck me and I wished suddenly that Sam were there to laugh with me. Later that night, relating the experience as we walked from my flat to his, he was and he did. And I realized that he managed - inadvertently - to give me a far greater gift than a simple massage. His gift gave me the chance to grow: as a writer, as an expat, as a human. It let me see that he could laugh at things that might throw other men into a fit of insecurity. It reassured me that I could be honest with him, and that means more to me than all the happy endings in the world.

My back does still kinda hurt, though.