Once we had finished with the consular and customs formalities we went out to see the city. It is extremely picturesque and noticeably different from Arica, only a few miles to the south. There is a very marked Quechua or Aymara influence to be seen in many aspects of everyday life here. Heading toward the outskirts, the central streets turn into alleyways that snake between little market gardens. As a remembrance of the Inca system there is no such thing as a wire fence. Only a line of reeds, pomegranate or fig trees mark the boundaries between the different properties.
On our way we met various Indian women riding donkeys and wearing the traditional clothing that we’ve seen only in pictures or at folk festivals—wide skirts, ponchos and their traditional bowler hats. They were taking their produce—watermelons, pumpkins, bananas, chili peppers, ocumos1 and so on—to market.
We stuffed ourselves on figs and grapes, but were disappointed when it came to pomegranates, as they seem to be the local birds’ favorite treat. They devour all the fruit through a tiny, almost imperceptible hole, leaving the outside apparently intact.
We’re waiting at the police post of the Peruvian Civil Guard to see if we can get someone to give us a lift to Cuzco. I’m feeling happy but nervous, because I’m itching to get there and see the life of the exploited Quechua Indians at first hand, to really feel the wonders of the Inca civilization. To see for myself, not through the prose of Inca Garcilaso2 or the novels of Ciro Alegría, what remains of the Inca kingdom and its splendors, destroyed by the avarice of Pizarro and the Spanish Empire and exploited today by Peruvian landowners. To try and calm down I came and sat with my diary to record what has happened so far.
On the 24th, just as we were about to take out the crumpled soles that I guard jealously along with my pistol, a young Indian came up to tell us that a sergeant we had met was in pain and wanted us to examine him. We tended him, gave him an injection of papaverine and a bit of psychotherapy, and he soon felt better. Shortly afterward, another sergeant arrived to take over his post. He invited us to stay, to eat and sleep there until he could send us to Cuzco. He turned out to be an extraordinary character. He started talking about the beauties of Peru and its Inca ruins, which filled us with enthusiasm. But he spoke in such affected phrases, peppered with obscure terms that had nothing to do with what he was talking about, that it was difficult to follow his story. Sometimes he couldn’t find the right word, and then he would stop stock-still until it came to him, and off he would go again, firing his elaborate Gongoristic phrases at us. Fúser and I stood it as long as we could, dying with laughter, and in the end we went off to get some sleep.
On the 25th we whiled away a few pleasant hours in the company of two sisters, the daughters of a Japanese family, whom we met this morning (and from whom we scrounged lunch), while we waited to get a driver who was a friend of theirs to take us as far as Tarata, a major stop on the way to Lake Titicaca.
At first the road reminded us of northern Chile, but as we climbed higher the mountains went from sandy to rocky and took on that coppery color characteristic of the Andes we know. The hillsides were empty desert to begin with, but first a few cactus began to appear, then espinillos and pepper trees and later some yellow-flowering shrubs, and in the end all the hillsides were green. This color in the landscape filled me with incredible happiness and euphoria.
Soon we arrived in a little town called Estaque. If the genuine Aymara civilization still exists anywhere it’s here, both in the architecture and in the dress and customs of the inhabitants.
The real climb began as we left the town. The mountains rose higher, and instead of a gentle slope the incline becomes a sheer abyss at the bottom of which a foaming torrent goes cascading down.
Great waterfalls that cut the road every few miles came into view, and at last we saw the first cultivated mountainsides. These are almost perpendicular slopes, but thanks to the system of terraces the Aymara grow potatoes, maize, chili peppers, and so on. The terraces are little horizontal platforms in which the earth is retained by means of a kind of border made of stones arranged one on top of another. It is both really interesting and lovely to see all these terraces, each a different shade of green, cut in symmetrical steps and with a special added touch of color by the Indian women in their bright clothing.
The maize they grow here must be genetically identical to the crop grown in America since before the Discovery. It is distinguished by the dark purple husk that protects the fruit, and the white cob with splashes of purple.
Next we came to a traditional indigenous village, with its low houses and truncated streets, some of which can be as much as a hundred feet higher than those running parallel to them. At the entrance to the village there are some canals running above the level of the road, and where the road cuts across the canal they’ve made pipes of hollowed tree trunks that go over the road like a bridge.
Of all the men traveling in the truck we were the only ones of European descent; all the others were pure Aymara. Looking at them I couldn’t help thinking of the gauchos in Molina Campos’s paintings—coppery complexions, broad flat noses, prominent cheekbones, some with sparse mustaches, wide mouths and small eyes like certain Asians. All were poorly dressed and either barefoot or wearing thong sandals. All of them without exception chewed coca uninterruptedly throughout the trip.
Although people say they are retiring and hostile, they talked and laughed with us all the time. Of course, a lot of them didn’t speak Spanish, but those who did needed no coaxing to tell us about anything we asked them.
We reached Tarata, which in Aymara means fork in the road, at about five o’clock in the afternoon. For a few moments we stood contemplating a wonderful contrast. While the little town shone in the sun that burned over our heads, a few miles away beyond the fork we could see snow falling. An uncommon sight!
While we were looking for somewhere to spend the night we came upon a group of recruits playing basketball. We went over and, although the village lies at a height of more than 8,000 feet and—according to the experts—we shouldn’t have been able to move, we joined in and didn’t feel any lack of air at all. Pelao didn’t even remember that he suffers from asthma.
The truck-bus left for Ilave at three o’clock in the morning. The engine roared into life and the vehicle began to climb. The cold was unbearable. The first couple of hours were boring, but at about five o’clock in the morning the sun came up and the peaks of the Andean foothills appeared, covered in snow. The vegetation disappeared again.
The mountain is covered with a kind of moss that acquires a woody consistency and is used as fuel by the herders looking after llamas and vicuñas.3 We soon reached the highest point, called Ilave, 16,000 feet above sea level. There was already snow lying across the road. The crystals of ice sparkled like an infinite number of tiny diamonds. The whole of the landscape went from the pale blue of the snow through the slightly darker blue of the clouds formed by the heat of the sun and the light blue of the hills, culminating in the deep blue of the sky. The combination and range of color is stunning.
By the time we crossed the last of the snowy hills the clouds formed by the snow’s evaporation were already enormous. Their blue contrasted with the coppery red of the hills without snow on them, and these in turn were splashed with the green of the moss. It was a very different spectacle from the previous scene, but no less beautiful.
At the highest point of the road we saw a mound, formed by thousands of small stones piled up, with a wooden cross on top. Most of the passengers spat outside as we passed, and one of them crossed himself. I leaned over to the most educated of them and asked him what this meant. He told me that the mound was an Apacheta, and that each traveler who walks by leaves a stone there, and with it he leaves behind his sorrows, ailments and bitterness. Being aboard the truck, they spat instead and with the spittle they got rid of all the evil they carried with them.
“And what about the cross?” I asked him.
“The priest put it there to confuse the Indians,” he said.
He explained to me how the priest makes an amalgam of religions out of the cross and the Apacheta, tries to confuse the Indians, and in the end passes them off as Catholics. That way he can say there are thousands of believers in his parish, when in fact they still believe in Paccha Mama4 and Viracocha5 under a different guise.
I went on thinking for a long time about the beauty and poetry of the Apacheta, the criminal behavior of the priest, and about this Indian—poorly clothed and fed even worse—who had been able to explain this historical and social phenomenon in so few words, with a clarity and depth that a well-dressed and very well-paid professor would have envied.
This is one side of the coin, I told myself, the beauty of the landscape and a man capable of standing up for himself. But here’s the other side: the rest of the Indians sharing this journey with us, a shapeless mass of drowsy beings, a race who for five centuries have been taught to think they are inferior, defeated and fit only for slavery, while at the same time they have been numbed by coca and alcohol.
They are so used to being ill-treated and humiliated that when we got into the truck, unable to see anything because it was so dark, we accidentally stepped on several people who were curled up on the floor, but not one of whom so much as uttered a word of complaint or warning.
By this time we were already on the high plateau, which is quite similar to the area preceding Patagonia—that is to say, mountains that form veritable Roman amphitheaters surrounding plains covered in tall wild grasses, where flocks of llamas, alpacas and vicuñas come down to graze. This area—full of animals and watered by the river Huenque, alive with trout—made me imagine what it might be like to make this same trip in a caravan with my brothers, seeing everything, fishing and hunting. It would be wonderful.
On the 26th we began to follow the shores of Lake Titicaca. We reached Puno at about six o’clock in the evening and immediately rushed down to the lake as if afraid it was about to disappear.
It looked very small to us at first, but what we were looking at was actually a small inlet or bay of the lake that lay between the peninsulas of Capachica and Chucuíto. We climbed the Chucuíto promontory and there before us spread the famous lake, vast, silent and serene. For Pelao and me it was one of the milestones of our journey. (The next is nearby too—Machu Picchu.) I felt so happy, as did Pelao. We shook hands in silence, and then Ernesto said, as if in answer to a question, “True to our principles and decisiveness, it’s all turned out so well.”
I didn’t answer, because it had all been said, but I plan to remain principled and decisive.
On the 27th we went back to the lake to see if we could get out on the water. This proved impossible, because we couldn’t make ourselves understood by any of the few fishermen we met. That afternoon we went to the UNICEF dispensary, which was running a fumigation campaign to eradicate malaria. Chatting with the doctor in charge, I discovered that there was a leprologist working in Cuzco—a Dr. Hermosa, whom I’d met in 1950 at a skin and syphilis conference in Tucumán, in Argentina. So I’ll present myself there and we’ll see what sort of reception we get.
At six in the morning on the 28th we embarked in a truck making the Puno–Juliaca run. It was packed. But just as we left town, thanks to the inimitable art of truck drivers—who are true pioneers in the science of using inter-atomic spaces—we managed to squeeze in about twenty cases of potatoes, five barrels and four or five more passengers.
The landscape in this area is more arid than around the lake, and since it slopes down toward the sea it only ever rains here in summer; in winter it freezes, but never snows.
The journey was rough, passing through small towns with houses made of adobe and streets so narrow the truck can hardly get through them.
When we got to Juliaca we called in at the police station as usual. Then we went out to get some lunch (which cost three soles) and when we got back we found there was no chance of traveling any farther that day.
Not long after that a sergeant rolled into the police station as drunk as a skunk, bringing with him an officer, equally saturated with ethyl alcohol. After swearing and cursing at his subordinates he started in on us, but we won him round and it wasn’t long before we were as thick as thieves. He invited us to have a drink. We accepted unanimously. We went out into the street to a bar a few paces away from the police station. The sergeant called for a bottle of pisco,6 and just to show what a man he was he drew his revolver and aimed a shot overhead. The bullet ricocheted off one of the walls, then off the ceiling and hit a nearby table. Naturally enough we did not find this very amusing, and neither did the owner of the bar. It was not long before a captain in the Civil Guard turned up and held a brief discussion with the sergeant in private. The sergeant looked at me and asked with exaggerated signs of complicity, “Che,7 argentino, haven’t you got any more firecrackers?”
Of course, I went to his aid and said no, I didn’t have any more, and in fact it was me that threw the firecracker. Meanwhile I signaled to the captain as if to say: I’m only saying this to keep this drunkard, your subordinate, out of trouble.
Just then we heard a truck sounding its horn to announce it was about to set out, and we seized the opportunity to duck out.
We took the truck, which was heading for Cuzco. The load was more heterogeneous than on our previous trips. Of course, most of the passengers were Indians—almost all Quechuas rather than Aymaras—but there were half-castes too, as well as people from the coast, meaning people with a higher percentage of European blood.
We hadn’t been going long when we got caught in the rain. A tarpaulin was quickly put up, because each and every one of the Europeanized and half-caste passengers started shouting and kicking up a fuss. On our way to Puno a few days before, on the other hand, when the only travelers were Indians and the two of us, there’d been a torrential downpour and only “their white majesties” Fúser and Mial got invited to move into the cab, despite the presence of Indian women both young and old, who were just as exposed to the rain as we were. In spite of our protests and resistance—we were ashamed to take precedence over the women—we ended up giving in and moving inside.
The squall turned into a hailstorm, which fortunately didn’t last long, because the tarpaulin was in no state to stand up to the impact of the hailstones for long.
Soon it was night. Along with a couple of guys from Arequipa we started up a few songs, and then the pisco went round to ward off the cold, and in the end I started chewing coca to see what it was like.
All through the long run new passengers kept getting on as others got off, most of them Indian women with their children. Watching them confirmed my first impression of how loving they are with their offspring. They treat them with greater tenderness than I have seen in other races. They play with them all the time and give them whatever they can to eat, day and night. The little ones seem to be insatiable.
The landscape here is like that of the north of Patagonia—that is to say, high and level plateaux surrounded by hills. There are a few flocks of alpaca to be seen again, but generally speaking there are more llamas and sheep. According to what I was told, the alpacas and the vicuñas have to live in very high places where the grass they eat is very tough, because if they graze on softer plants their teeth grow far too long, as can happen to beavers.
At dawn we had several more downpours. What bothered me most was the nausea I felt from my experiment with chewing coca.
We reached Sicuani. Like all the towns in the sierra it has a small central square flanked by the church and the municipal buildings. Next to the square is the market, where the Indian women sit by their steaming cooking pots in vociferous confusion, selling soups, chili stews, corn on the cob, boiled cassava and all kinds of other things to eat, many of which were unknown to us.
We had lunch and then went to ask for lodgings at the police station. As at other times, they were suspicious of us at first, but the more they let us talk, the more we won their confidence, and they ended up offering us dinner and a place to sleep.
We went out to look round the town and met a guy who was really crazy. He said he was descended from the last chiefs of that region. He invited us to drink tea and listen to some of his compositions for the flute. He played us one, and it was so bad that even Pelao noticed it. We drank the tea and said a hasty goodbye. We went on looking round the town and making plans for a future journey by caravan.
We’re still here at the Civil Guard post, expecting to leave for Cuzco at any moment.