Cusco, South America’s most ancient city, cosmic center of the Inca shaped like the puma, Qorikancha temple once covered in gold and silver, now a city cosmopolitan, of visitors speaking with many tongues led by youthful guides - hair stylishly done with jackets fitting exactly - through gothic cathedrals of mannequin saints and replicas of Jesus violent in his agony, the crucifix of San Blas Cathedral blackened by centuries of candles, the arms and thorny head attach to ropes that pull and animate, once meant to trick the indigenous into converting, into donating – imagine it! – beneath sacristies gilded from plundered Incan silver and gold, an armada of canvasses sagging under the immense weight of their own darkness and history, dark alleyways between Incan palaces end in bright grassy plazas of lovers and women in Quechuan textiles who grip their roped llamas and entice tourists to pay for their pictures.

The sun gathers us to the Plaza de Armas; in the rain everyone retreats beneath the encompassing portico where dozens of teenage girls market massages; then it is sunny again and the Plaza is full - just like that! - and always the taxis circling counterclockwise, day and night, beeping with the police men and women, so smart in their starched uniforms, so fond of their own whistles.

Overhead flies the rainbow flag of Cusco, reminding me of my home, San Francisco, as do the steep streets of bohemian San Blas, though here more literally breathtaking in the thin mountain air, the morning residents trot down and down the steps and more steps, as if they live in the sky and simply commute to Cusco...

...and then for a moment I long for the ocean and San Francisco is near me, seeping inside of me with a rich Quillabamban brew at Café Ayulli, coffee beans from cloud forests beyond the heights of Machu Picchu but not quite yet to the Amazonian depths, a little more coffee now and an alfajore too as I notice an old man alone in his finest suit staring into his memories. A group of intellectuals engage intently - I do not understand enough to know what they think or how they feel, only that they are thinking and feeling fully.

At night Christo Blanco spreads his arms on high, ready to dive down upon us, ready for war with Saqsaywaman, the adjacent Incan fortress so decimated by the Spanish its stones are the stones of Spanish cathedrals and yet its greatest stones still sit massively, immutable walls watching over Cusco, by design the battlements are the teeth of the city’s puma, for centuries her jaws frozen open.