N NOVEMBER 2015 I boarded a flight to Peru with my husband Simone and a freshly broken arm. The trip was partly in response to a midlife crisis; that I would be doing it while nursing a broken bone felt fitting. I had rarely felt more in need of luck, or so short on it. While queuing in the airport terminal, I had asked the woman behind us if I could offer a sucker to her child. Giving candy to a child before every journey was a ritual I had observed since 1991, when a Senegalese marabout, a healer in Wolof society, told me I would spend a lifetime traveling and that the ceremony would help keep me safe. Call me superstitious, but I wasn’t about to forego it now.
Breaking my arm only days before we were to leave— roller-skating, of all things—had meant a number of last-minute changes of plan. We scratched the grueling hike along the Inca Trail, and instead I had located a small hotel in T’oqokachi, the artsy San Blas district of Cusco. Still, it was a steep climb above the Plaza de Armas, at the center of town. Like many places in Peru, the Plaza de Armas has two names, one Spanish, one Indigenous: the other, Huacaypata, means “place of crying” in Quechua, which is fitting considering that the great revolutionary leader, Túpac Amaru II, was executed there in 1781.