Heart and Sole

I’m thinking about my shoes now. And about the genealogy of objects, about a blood-red sunrise in East Africa, about happenstance, about craftsmanship, form and function--and about the pleasure provided by certain possessions in our lives. Also, I’m thinking about two cobblers on opposite sides of the world who made these shoes.

But first I’m thinking about an adage. That in our hearts we have room to feel affection for only a few belongings. Hemingway said that. As happens, Hemingway plays a bit part in the story of these rugged, versatile shoes that have earned my affection.

I know them as chupplies. An acquaintance from Pakistan says the proper word is chappals, though he also calls them Peshawari. Guides in Kenya transformed the name into choplies, as if to describe the two pieces of leather, shaped like overlapping pork chops, that lie over your foot and buckle behind the heel.

Here is what I know of their origins: Sometime in the late 19th century, a British army officer bought a pair of them in Peshawar, in northern Pakistan. In the first years of the 20th century, he traveled to East Africa, to what would become the colony of Kenya, up into the lush flowers of the equatorial highlands to the brand new township of Nairobi.

Immigrants from East India had built the railroad there from the coast, much like immigrant Chinese built America’s railroads into the frontier. The Indian immigrants liked the place. They set up businesses, called it home. One became a cobbler. One day the cobbler welcomed the British officer and his chupplies into his shop. The shoes were too worn out to fix. The shoemaker offered to duplicate them.

*

I heard this story from the now-aged son of this shoemaker as I stood with my bare foot pressed down on an open ledger book. The old man with callused hands traced the outline of my foot in soft pencil, with my left foot crossed over my right on a single coarse page.

His shop was a fantastic clutter of shoes, leather, dust, boxes, dyes, laces, sagging display cases. There were a couple of vinyl stools and a straw broom in the corner. The mass of materials muffled the screech of traffic outside on Moi Avenue, formerly Garment Road. The shop was called Pitamber Khoda. This was 1994.

What about others who had put their feet on the pages of the family ledgers, the first step in measuring a new pair of shoes?

“Hemingway? Yes, we have him in a book upstairs,” said the shoemaker. Actually, that was the reason I’d come: to write a story about Hemingway’s Africa and Africa today. I would start here in his footsteps, so to speak.

Along with Hemingway were tracings of feet of thousands of others of the famous and forgotten who had passed through Nairobi this century. Some ordered boots, but chupplies were the mainstay.

Pitamber Khoda is the last of East Africa’s famous safari outfitters. The khaki-suit tailors, haberdashers and luggage makers of the colonial age are gone. Some new tent shops and makers of fold-up furniture have reappeared. Pitamber Khoda alone links one African era with another.

Beyond the story of the British officer, the first hard evidence I found of African chupplies was on the feet of a black safari tracker in a photograph dated 1906. The founding president of the Republic of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, wore them in the 1960s. His feet were almost as wide as they were long, the old cobbler recalled. I have seen chupplies on the feet of today’s young safari guides, white and black. Nairobi photographer-writer-character Peter Beard, the author of several books and many legends, posed a few years ago while washing the hair of a fashion model in an African mudhole. She wore nothing, he wore an African wrap and chupplies.

I ordered my first pair, standard cordovan, $45. The shop produces one pair a day.

“With these you walk 1,000 kilometers. Then come back and we’ll fix them like new,” the cobbler told me.

Well, that would be a start.

I never counted kilometers. But I wore them, and pretty soon they were all I wore. Once at daybreak I walked along the northern edge of the Serengeti with the sun vicious red under the thorn trees, and I heard off in the distance--but not far enough in the distance--the roar of a lion, and the slender Masai spear shook nervously in the hand of my African guide. We wore chupplies.

I wore them to the refugee camps in Zaire, up the mountains of Rwanda looking for gorillas, and into the Nile River jungle of Uganda looking for guerrillas. I wore them when tracer bullets lit the sky of Mogadishu, and while the flicker-light of a cook fire at a Masai Mara tourist camp caught glints of unknown animal eyes out on the periphery.

Then I came home.

My chupplies needed attention. New soles at least.

*

Easy, said Sergio Benavides. the sign on his old and fantastically cluttered shop on 2nd Avenue between Broadway and Spring Street says, straightforwardly, “Shoe Repair.” Next week, my chupplies had cushy new Vibram soles. Which gave me an excuse to tell Benavides the story of the shoes, or what I knew of the story.

He smiled and disappeared into the maze of boxes, hanging shoes, machinery and dust of his workroom. He returned, and in the palms of his hands were leather pork chops: the raw beginning of his own bench-made chupplies.

It turned out that Benavides is not, at heart, a repairman. He does that to pay the rent--and business isn’t what it used to be in downtown Los Angeles. But “my life,” he says, is making shoes.

He is 50 with seven children and 11 grandchildren. He has been in the shoe business since he was 6 and an apprentice in his father’s shop in Mexico. All the family live in the United States now: his father and his brother both have shoe repair shops in the region. Benavides dreams that someday he will not have to sell shoelaces and fix the mass-produced products of foreign factories to feed himself. He dreams that people will yearn again for craftsmanship and that he will satisfy that yearning from the bins of leather that fill his basement.

I stop in often and talk to Benavides these days. I bought his first pair of chupplies for $65. It was not enough. I upped the price to $75 for a second pair. I still don’t think it’s enough for something built to fit and to last.

I wear dress chupplies with coat and tie. The other pair, from heavier oiled leather, goes everywhere else. This year I wore chupplies at the beach walks of Waikiki, and I wore them to Alaska, down the Yukon River in a canoe. I will wear them into the mountains of Colorado. I will wear them through the looming, aqueous swirls of El Nino.

Chupplies have, beyond everything else, a secret: Although airy like sandals and substantial enough to pass for office shoes, the double layer of leather over the top of the foot insulates. This part of the foot is where blood vessels pass closest to the skin. Keep the blood warm and your feet are warm. So, comfortable in California winter, breezy in summer. The shoes of an African president and British colonial officer. Shoes made by an Indian immigrant in Africa and a Mexican immigrant in California. My shoes.

And Benavides’ shoes. He wears nothing else now. “These are my best, most comfortable,” he says, kicking up a foot.

My chupplies draw comments sometimes, and I have been mentioning Benavides to those who ask. Now I notice a couple of other people in chupplies here at Times Mirror Square. From this building, journalists travel everywhere in our world. Maybe they will bring their chupplies to another cobbler somewhere else far away. I’m thinking they should take the story with them.