Repatriated from Peru: An Interview with Artist Denise Bellezzo by Gint Aras
Denise Bellezzo is a visual artist and art educator whose career has spanned four decades. The resident of Naperville, Illinois has dedicated her artistic pursuits to blend fine and folk art, and her interest in multicultural experience expresses itself in recent work through a fusion of classical, post-modern and indigenous motifs. Because Bellezzo prefers to keep the experience of her art to the immediacy of exhibitions, she does not have a website.
This past February and March, Bellezzo joined a group of artists in Arquetopia, an international arts residency in Urubamba, Peru.
Obviously, her residency coincided with the COVID outbreak. She and her husband were among the approximately 4,500 Americans eventually repatriated from Peru. I spoke to her via WhatsApp about the ordeal.
GA: Denise, thanks so much for agreeing to talk about your experience. You were in Urubamba, Peru from February 27th, and you were originally due to come back on March 30th. What was your original plan?
DB: My husband and I were accepted to a residency at Arquetopia. His name is David Bower. He’s also an artist and art educator. We had done three residencies with them before in Mexico, but they they opened up a site in Peru about two years ago. We had an art project, and we were also interested in a natural dye workshop taught by a Quechua weaver. So we were going to work with her twice a week, six sessions, to dye wool with natural methods using plants and minerals.
GA: When did it become clear you’d have to change plans?
DB: On March 16th, President Martín Vizcarra put Peru on lockdown. He initially set the quarantine for 15 days. The bars and restaurants were closed. You were only allowed to go to the bank or the market for food. Nobody could drive, so all busses, taxis and transport…you couldn’t do that. Flights were also halted, with only special planes flying from Cusco to Lima.
GA: That sounds substantially stronger than what lockdowns occurred in the United States.
DB: Yes. At the time, there was really no way out. You had to stay where you were.
The airline cancelled our flight home. On March 16th, they announced they were not going to be flying until April 21st. There was a scramble by people to get to the airport to get out on that one day. But we didn’t have a flight, and we didn’t have transport, so there wasn’t anything that we could do to leave just then.
GA: So, whom did you contact, and what did you attempt?
DB: Well, it was complicated. We thought we’d have to figure out some way to get to Lima. When we had booked our return trip, our original plan all along had been to go to Lima for two nights and then fly to Chicago. But the Lima hotel cancelled. The flights to Lima from the rest of Peru were cancelled. So we didn’t have any plan.
GA: How did the US Embassy respond to the crisis?
DB: [Laughs] The US Embassy left Lima on March 20th. They were flown back to Washington. The embassy was reduced to virtual staff. The ambassador was gone. If you called the American Citizen Services, you’d get someone who was not in Peru, and they could not help me get a phone message to the embassy.
Eventually, I was able to contact the State Department. Initially, it didn’t seem they were on board to repatriate us. The State Department had to negotiate with the Peruvian government to get planes. They had some kind of deal with Latam Airlines from Chile. Part of the problem with Cusco is that few American pilots are certified to fly out from that altitude. American planes can only fly to Lima. So they coordinated with Latam, and got a plane.
GA: And then you could leave?
DB: You have to understand that this was really complicated. The American government was completely disorganized.
I was told I had to sign up with STEP (Smart Traveler Enrollment Program) through the State Department. You’re supposed to register any time you leave the country, so they’d know where you are. Anyway, I followed all their directions. There was a “repatriation task force” for which I filled out forms.
But none of that got us anywhere. The American officials didn’t really get their act together until Marco Rubio got involved.
GA: Yeah, I read about it. A Rubio official had some scathing words: “…The individual manning the Peru desk has been 'tracking' this issue for a week, but doing nothing and the Ambassador essentially abandoned the post to return to Washington.” They claimed the Ambassador’s departure was due to “medical reasons.”
DB: Who knows? But things started to move fast when Rubio got involved.
On March 23rd, we got an email that said we were on the first flight out of Cusco. Our names were on a repatriation program spreadsheet, and they would send us a mobile permit. We’d have to show it to authorities so a driver could take us to the airport.
When we got this news, we didn’t know what time this mobile permit would come, so we packed. Then, on March 24—that was Tuesday morning—they said, “It’s not gonna happen.” The Latan flight they had organized from Miami didn’t have permission to land in Peru, so it was cancelled.
My husband and I tried calling every possible place. At that point, we were exhausted from our ordeal so we just went to bed.
We got a message that night around midnight that said we had to be at the airport at 8:30 in the morning, that was March 25th. The mobility permit was included. Of course, I was sleeping when the message came. I just happened to see it at 4:30 in the morning when I randomly woke up.
GA: So, you had to scramble?
DB: We didn’t even know if we’d be able to get a car. The residency director called a taxi driver, but he turned out to be too far away. Eventually, the director found a guy in the area who would drive us. We had to go to the police station in Urubamba with the mobility permit to get permission to drive to the airport.
The car came at 6:00. We went to the police. There, the guard told us he could not permit us to go further because their office only opened at 8:00.
So, I looked at my husband, and he had the fear of God in his eyes that they weren’t going to let us out. And I just started crying. I didn’t mean to…it just happened. At that point, the guard pulled off his mask, smiled and let us go.
The ride was beautiful. You know, the fog and the mountains. So I’m crying the whole time and keeping my fingers crossed.
GA: But you made it to the airport?
DB: We got there around 7:30, and there was a long line outside. We didn’t actually get to go inside the airport until around 11:00.
They had one table set up with one person from the State Department or Embassy checking us off. They checked our names three or four times to make sure we were on the manifest. They accidentally had families split up. It was just enormously stressful.
Then we all had to sign a promissory note, agree to pay back the government for this flight. There was no price on it. We anticipate anywhere from $1,000-$1,200 each.
Once we got in, two people took our temperatures, the dogs sniffed our luggage, and then we could board.
GA: You flew to Miami. What was it like to land there?
DB: That’s right, to Miami. That was March 25th, and we landed pretty late. The airport was really relaxed. I mean, within hours, we had come from strict lockdown into a space that was going on as if nothing was happening. The airport was relatively slow, because only a few flights had landed at that time. We went through border control, and nobody had a mask on.
Most of the repatriated that joined us had to go to hotels. Fortunately, my brother lives in Ft. Lauderdale during the winter, and we could just take a taxi there. We stayed with him until we could get a flight back to Chicago. That came in on Monday, March 30th.
GA: As a writer, I always find it curious, when thinking about the process of going through an ordeal, to consider how we assess the line between fortune or misfortune. So much of your experience leaves me thinking about this.
DB: Oh, believe me. Yes.
In Florida, there didn’t seem to be any sensible pattern to the response. The restaurants were closed, and the beaches were closed. But you could move around freely. There were loads of people going to stores like Target and Home Depot. It was actually quite scary, because even though we were motivated to get home, we also wondered if our chances of getting sick in Urubamba were lower. Urubamba is a town, but it’s still pretty rural, and there had not been any cases at that point. In Florida, with all the people interacting, it seemed like our chances of contracting the virus were much higher.
In Peru, the uncertainty was the worst, and the confusion, how disoriented our government left us. Every day in Peru was spent wondering how we were going to get home, if we’d ever be able to get home.
It would have been better had somebody said, “You’ll have a flight once quarantine is lifted,” but we didn’t even get that kind of information. I didn’t want to stay there until May. Some people did opt to stay there, but the situation in Peru kept getting worse. We didn’t want to be there for the tipping point.
GA: What’s it like, mentally, to be in that kind of a state of limbo?
DB: On one hand, calm. After all, it’s an artists’ residency in a beautiful town. On the other, you know, you have this wish for certainty.
There was this church in town. I’d go there every day to buy these candles. The church wasn’t open, but there was a building next to the church that had all the candle racks set up. I had never seen anything like it. It’s got melted candle wax over it, and all over the floor from the dripping, and many candles burning. I could buy five candles for fifty cents. I would go each day, and I would light them.
I started out praying for Italy, but then it just became Oh, my God.
Still, I would do that. And then one day I had the unlit candles in my hand. And I was putting another candle onto the stand, and I looked down, and this blue candle I had bought was suddenly lit. I was holding it in my hand. I have no idea how it got lit. And I was just freaky freaky freaky.
It was that day that we got the notice, you know, at midnight, that we would be on the flight. I don’t know what to believe in, but that was just creepy. My husband, who doesn’t believe in this stuff was like, “How did that blue candle get lit,” and I was just, “I have no idea.”
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Gint Aras’s prose considers such themes as identity, consciousness and multicultural experience. He’s the author of two novels, The Fugue (Tortoise, 2016) and Finding the Moon in Sugar (Infinity, 2009), and a memoir, Relief by Execution: A Visit to Mauthausen (Homebound, 2019). He splits his time between Chicago, Illinois and Klaipėda, Lithuania.
