Pomabamba. 2 & 3 October
Our dottiest day had such happy consequences that last evening I was, regrettably, in no fit state to write my diary. Pomabambe celebrates its annual fiesta at this time (St Francis of Assisi is the patron saint) and it would have been churlish of me not to participate. So yesterday was spent in a haze of nameless alcohol. The occasion had something in common with an Irish wake, to the extent that during fiestas the campesinos see drunkenness not as an extravagance, or a joke, or a vice, but as – in some obscure way – part of the religious ceremony. This is an ancient and worldwide primitive tradition; at the dawn of Hinduism Aryan priests newly arrived in Northern India got ritually smashed on soma. I don’t know what I got smashed on last evening but throughout the day I was given so many powerful potions that I ended up dancing with the campesinos in the Plaza – though dancing is not one of my skills. The fiesta spirit(s) so envelope(s) everyone that even the Indians, now thronging into Pomabamba, forget their ‘thing’ about gringoes. This uninhibiting effect of alcohol is the main reason why, for millennia, unsophisticated peoples have used drink and drugs during religious ceremonies; these free the soul to establish contact with whatever form of the immaterial is believed-to exist beyond the confines and conventions of mundane life.
Yesterday Rachel observed that she had never seen or heard anything less religious than Pomabamba’s fiesta, but today her attitude had changed. She said, sounding slightly puzzled, “Obviously the religious part does matter too”. Often one can place more reliance on a child’s judgement, in such matters, than on an adult’s. Nine-year-olds are without our prejudices and have not yet lost their sensitivity to what may lie below the surface. To me the Catholic Church’s cynical deviousness in Peru, and elsewhere throughout Latin America, is extremely off-putting. In Indians of the Andes, Harold Osborne explained: ‘After 1650, many native practices which had before been the object of militant missionary repression came to be tolerated as harmless, if deplorable, superstitions and the way lay open for the advance of syncretic Christianity. Since that time it has not looked back.’
The Church in Peru had no alternative but to compromise, as the Buddhist pioneers in ninth-century Tibet had no alternative but to accommodate their teachings to the ancient Bon-po religion. But, unlike the Buddhist missionaries, the Church authorities never admitted that they had compromised and they still try to draw a veil of hypocrisy over Peruvian Roman Catholicism – a veil in which the Liberation Theologians have recently, to their great credit, torn some large holes. One is appalled by the sloth and greed of the native Peruvian clergy. They don’t minister to the people of the sierra; that materially unrewarding job is left to foreign priests – Germans, Irish, Americans, English, Italian, Poles and Dutch. In fact not many Peruvians now become priests, but the majority of those who do cluster around the urban rich like bluebottles around bad meat.
In the Pomabamba area, during the past year, the whole campesino population, like most of the mestizo townsfolk, have been saving up to pay for this fiesta. It is believed that adequate rains, good harvests, healthy families and flocks, prosperous businesses and fertile wives all depend on the generosity of one’s contribution to the fiesta fund. The campesinos look upon their patron saint as an ally of – or possibly another manifestation of – the aukis or mountain spirits, or the apus or place spirits. It would be wrong for the clergy not to accept the money thus offered, gladly, to insure against calamity during the year ahead. But the Catholic Church is a grossly rich institution which does not need the precious centavos of half-starved peasants and it should be possible discreetly to return fiesta donations to the community. Yet this is not often done. (Much of the money collected is of course spent on ceremonial booze; the Church only gets a percentage, which varies widely from area to area.)
Andean fiestas are the despair of earnest young American anthropologists who yearn to analyse in their theses the precise significance of every dance and costume and gesture and mask and musical instrument and coloured bead and ankle-bell and headdress. No coherent explanations are forthcoming, either from the locals or from Peruvian historians or folklorists. Here, the two educated mestizo families (a teacher’s and a merchant’s) who have befriended us, themselves know nothing of their fiesta’s origins beyond the fact that similar celebrations were part of Inca and pre-Inca cultures and that the keynote is ‘propitiation’.
In a small square, some distance from the main Plaza, we visited a delapidated little church with broken, grass-grown steps – a building clearly not much used throughout the year. In front of several statues and pictures of St Francis, campesinos were placing offerings of eggs, potatoes, fruit or flowers – and then prostrating themselves. Outside, in each corner of the square, as in many other parts of the pueblo, shrines have been set up (tradesmen’s stalls, draped in coloured paper and lengths of bright cloth) and within each a statue of St Francis is surrounded by large dolls elaborately dressed in campesino style. Some are decorated with gold turnip watches, silver coins, pieces of quite valuable jewelry and cheap trinkets. The shelves beside the ‘altar’ are laden with further offerings: hideous china dogs and cats, plastic toys, plastic flowers, repulsive ornaments, gorgeously embroidered cushion-covers, antique tobacco pipes – any and every sort of household treasure or cherished family heirloom. These offerings are only on loan to their patron and will be retrieved at the end of the fiesta. It gives one a good feeling to know that even after dark they can safely be left on display in these open stalls – unguarded, unless one counts the statue of St Francis. This morning, the streets were crowded with women carrying silver objects to the church to be offered during that Mass which is regarded as the solemn (though not entirely sober) centrepiece of the whole fiesta. We were astonished by the quantity of good silver this pueblo could produce: goblets, plates, jewelry, salvers, ornaments, coins, crucifixes, rosary beads.
After Mass, four wooden platforms, handsomely carved and gilded and each carried by ten men, left the church to process around the town – a three hour ceremony, with halts at many shrines for drinking and dancing. On these platforms, under arches laden with plastic flowers, stood life-size statues of Saints Francis, Anthony, Peter and John. A woman’s band preceded them, led by a man dressed in a pale pink track-suit who had the most blood-shot eyes I’ve ever seen; they looked as though they had just been gouged out and replaced. Evidently he was one of the thousands who had no sleep last night. (Rachel unkindly remarked that my own eyes didn’t look much better.) Six women dancers accompanied the band, wearing pale blue ankle-length silk dresses, long black lace veils over their faces and complicated head-dresses surmounted by crests of peacock feathers. They intoned a weirdly beautiful Quechua chant while rhythmically beating the ground with seven-foot high staves topped by crosses from which hung tiny bells and clusters of red, white and blue ribbons.
The mayor – his robes gorgeous though frayed, his chicha content high – told me in English that this ritual predates the Inca Empire: which could be true, though I don’t think Quechua was spoken in this area before the Incas took over. The dancing women were followed by two priests from Trujillo (who had celebrated the Mass), walking a few yards ahead of St Francis’s platform with open breviaries and bored expressions. The Holy Quartet were followed by a motley crowd of musicians, dancers and clowns, who have been roaming the town since yesterday. Included were mestizo men inexplicably attired as 18th-century hussars; campesinos wearing leather leggings, black masks of hide and goats-hair, and Napoleonic brass helmets; campesino sword dancers with bells on their ankles; groups of men wearing comical or savagely glaring masks and elaborate cloth helmets bedecked with coins, buttons, shells, religious medals – all surmounted by coloured plumes that swayed as they danced, like a field of exotic blooms in a gusty wind. Another group wore tight scarlet trousers and short royal blue jackets with red collars and cuffs, the ensemble being completed by a Homburg hat, a (real) sword held in the right hand and a cluster of bells tied to the left hand. These gentlemen danced indefatigably all day and all night, to the music of violins and tall portable harps. Another group, also equipped with Homburg hats, swords and finger-bells, wore impeccable lounge-suits, complete with collars and ties, and their faces were hidden by blue-eyed masks. When they paused to imbibe, one saw that they were mestizo youths. In the more prosperous streets, flower petals and confetti were thrown over the statues from the upstairs balconies by pious ladies too genteel to join in the rough and tumble; and bouquets of fresh flowers, wrapped in cellophane, were lowered on strings and received by acolytes for the further gratification of St Francis.
As I write, firecrackers are still being let off every few moments; this has been going on for the past thirty-six hours and must be an expensive item on the fiesta bill. The scene had become uninspiring when we withdrew. Several ugly brawls were starting, as an oddly desperate atmosphere replaced the earlier gaiety – these things are hard to define, but one did feel that something potentially dangerous had been released.
We have much enjoyed this hybrid event, during which the most ancient of Indian traditions and emotions merged into the campesinos’ idiosyncratic version of Christianity. Yet one cannot pretend that such a fiesta is a memorable artistic experience; there was nothing beautiful, skilful or subtle about the ‘folk-art’, and the general impression was of a static, stylised, almost moribund culture within which people feel no need to develop what past generations have handed down. (Apart from minor innovations, like the lounge-suited dancers who were mocking those Americans now controlling – in practice if not in theory – Peru’s mining industry.)
Today Rachel acquired a new pair of walking-shoes but my own search for suitable boots was unsuccessful. However, the cobbler here seemed super-efficient, so again one hopes … Displayed in his workshop, as in several other places in Pomabamba and Conchucos, was a government-issued poster urging people to eat more potatoes and less rice because ‘potatoes are as good as or better than rice’. Apparently rice has become the ‘in’ thing of recent years and potatoes are increasingly being despised as ‘campesinos’ food’. Food snobbery is unexpected in a country as poor as Peru.
Camp on Scrubland beyond Piscobamba. 4 October
My troops mutinied this morning. Rachel announced that she didn’t fancy another Duke of York exercise and that she knew Juana was of like mind. So we stayed with the carretera for twelve miles as it climbed gradually to Piscobamba. In this region there is no reason to be alarmed by the term ‘carretera’; today no vehicle passed us and there wasn’t a tyre-mark to be seen on the rough stony track. Yet there was much traffic, of the sort we enjoy, as campesinos hurried towards Pomabamba where the fiesta will continue for another few days. Some raggedly dressed wretches were carrying buckets of chicha which they will sell for ten soles a half-gourd – what an effort to earn a few pence!
Between Pomabamba and Piscobamba the two-storeyed farmhouses seem unusually spacious and prosperous-looking – all freshly whitewashed, some even with glazed windows – and the land looks rich and well-watered. But the people were not as friendly as those north of Conchucos. At noon we rested in the shade of a eucalyptus grove where a damp grassy patch provided a mule-snack. Across the road, a young man was strenuously ploughing with one ox; his wife followed, scattering seed. When they paused for lunch, Mamma took her infant off the back of a small girl and suckled it while she herself was eating cold boiled sweet potatoes. Although we greeted this little family, and were sitting within conversation distance of them, they completely ignored us.
Piscobamba is another pleasant little pueblo now marred by an abortive (for lack of funds) water supply and sewage scheme. The torn-up streets had to be crossed on insecure plank footbridges which Juana hated, nor did she much like having to scramble over shiny stacks of sewage pipes.
Several steep reduras took us through a harshly infertile area of unexpected chasms, naked, rock-strewn slopes and isolated smaller mountains. All afternoon we passed only a few halfstarved-looking campesinos who viewed us with some alarm.
This wide ledge of scrubland is well supplied with short grass and easy-to-light firewood. Not far below us, audible though invisible, is the Rio Pomabamba. I’m sitting now by a glowing pile of crimson embers, watching a silver sliver of moon sinking towards the black bulk of a sky-obscuring range we must cross tomorrow.
Camp in Field on Mountainside near San Luis. 5 October
By 6.30 we were skidding down to Rio level on a precipitous gravel path. On these river descents, one seems to be penetrating to the very bowels of the earth, so colossal and overbearing are the surrounding mountains. A jerry-built concrete bridge took us over the Rio Pomabamba for the last time; we all agree that we feel much safer on a well-made tree-trunk bridge. For two hours we were climbing steeply: first on a barren, rocky, thorn-bushy mountain too arid to feed even a goat, then on grassy, more gentle slopes where we passed a ‘quake-stricken village with an abandoned school and two-roomed police-post. Three new ‘quake ravines have severely disrupted the path and we almost went astray again while seeking ways to rejoin it. We brunched on a high, turfy pass, aromatic with herbs and overlooking a line of sparkling, distant snow-peaks. In the perfect stillness, sunny and windless, we could hear from far above the poignant, eternal music of a goatherd’s pipe – to me the most enduring authentic link with the Andes of the Incas.
From here the carretera was again visible, a few thousand feet below. That descent, on a ladder-steep path much complicated by ‘quake rifts, culminated in a tight-rope act when the path crossed the spine of a long, narrow, grey-black rock-spur with grisly drops inches away on both sides. My relief at getting off this horror was soon counteracted by the savage noon heat. We were now in a grim canyon of perpendicular rock-mountains with no trace of vegetation anywhere: not even a cactus grew on the walls of our oven. Crossing a dry, rocky river-bed, quarter of a mile wide, we rejoined the carretera and round the next bend beheld a motor – the rusting skeleton of a truck which added the final touch to this gloomy inferno.
I wilt within moments when exposed to extreme heat, which by my standards is anything over 75°F. Although the track continued level for a few miles, and we stopped often to drink our hot chemical-flavoured water, I soon felt more exhausted than if I had climbed 4,000 feet in a blizzard. Just then, as my morale reached zero, the Pomabamba cobbler – in whom I had tried so hard to believe – was revealed as a veritable charlatan when one of his nails suddenly pierced my foot to stigmata-like effect.
At last we emerged into a broad valley where the track began to rise along the flank of another dark, bare mountain, pulsating in the heat. Far below on our left flowed – we think – the Rio Yurma. (Here our map gives up pretending to be accurate and only a vague tangle of blue lines indicates the numerous local rivers.) Two hours later the track dropped steeply between outlandish grey-brown mud-cliffs that might have been moulded out of plasticene; when I poked my stick into one it easily made a dent. Now we couldn’t hear ourselves speak above the roar of the river. Then suddenly we were crossing it, on a solid wooden bridge above a narrow channel so steep that the river here becomes a violently beautiful waterfall, raving into a white whirlpool between smooth but grotesquely eroded boulders. Leaning over the bridge – made deliciously dizzy by the clamour and force of the water, and dazzled by its translucent emerald brilliance – we were in a moment outside of time: part of an elemental everlastingness.
Soon after, a taciturn young mestizo joined us. He was determined not to communicate, yet he walked close beside us as the road climbed away from the river to enter a broad valley – where we could see the little pueblo of San Luis, on a distant mountaintop.
When we came to a road-side shack our silent companion, pointing to it, considerately said “Chicha” – then scampered away, up a mountainside. Never has chicha tasted so good. Three soles bought at least a quart, in a huge gourd, from a filthy old woman with an embittered expression. She squatted in her doorway, unsmilingly regarding us as we sat on stones surrounded by turkeys, hens, striped piglets and spotted puppies. Repeatedly we were threatened by a xenophobic turkey-cock of fearsome proportions who eventually saw us off his territory with a quite alarming display of aggression.
We had difficulty finding a level spot for the tent on this steep slope below San Luis. Then Rachel noticed a narrow grassy shelf, just off the track on the edge of a newly harvested barley-field. Soon we were drinking soup around a fire of incense-like eucalyptus wood and my lacerated foot, released from its boot, could be forgotten as our exultant eyes beheld the King of the Cordillera Blanca – Huascaran, at 22,180 feet the highest mountain in Peru.
Camp on high Puna. 6 October
By 7.10 I was limping up a multi-pathed redura, speechless with pain. Rachel followed, leading Juana and looking anxious; I could no longer maintain the fiction that my defective boot ‘didn’t matter’. There was but a single thought in my mind: how to find a cobbler. (By now I could write a substantial thesis on ‘The Cobblers of the Peruvian Sierra’; people have got PhDs for less.) Soon we were mildly lost: we could no longer see San Luis. Then a leprechaun-sized campesino noticed our mistake from afar, left, two heavily laden burros in the care of his tiny daughter and insisted on walking back towards the pueblo to guide us onto the right path. Predictably, he wouldn’t accept a tip.
The cobbler was appalled, and we hope inspired, when I showed him my mangled sole. While he hammered, I applied a complex arrangement of padded plasters to the stigmata. San Luis is a good foraging centre. For less than fifty pence, we bought four packets of savoury biscuits, half a kilo of noodles, half a kilo of sugar, five bananas and twenty fresh buns – bread less than a fortnight old is a treat in these parts. A policeman, met in the bakery, told us that today’s pass is over 14,500 feet.
When we reached this pass six hours later we realised that it is not, strictly speaking, a pass – there are no nearby mountains – but simply the highest point on the track. All around us stretched a vastness of puna. Behind us a dark array of sharp rock peaks rose above a long, low bank of blue-black rain-cloud – all the peaks of freakishly uniform size and shape, and all tilted slightly to the left as we looked back at them. Far ahead lay a succession of mighty ranges, some snowy – among them the Cerro de Vincos, which we must cross on our way from Chavin to La Union.
It was 6.10 before we came upon this excellent grazing spot which is by far our coldest Andean site. However, the quenoa (a rare high-altitude tree) flourishes hereabouts and while I got the tent up Rachel, being very hungry, did her fuel-gathering bit with alarming enthusiasm. Once I looked around to see her two-thirds of the way up a tree that overhung a fifty-foot drop; she was breaking off dead branches and throwing them into the rocky gully beneath. So we have had the rare luxury of a fire on the puna – if you can call it a luxury. Because of the altitude we had great difficulty a) lighting it and b) cooking our noodles. Despite a steady wind I had to blow continuously to keep the water boiling and nothing was hot when served up; but we weren’t in a fussy mood. When Rachel crawled into the tent it was already stiff and glistening with frost. Then I had to strip naked in the icy wind to put on my high-altitude underwear. There’s no room in our tent for such manoeuvres, but though it may be cramped it’s very efficient. While writing this I have thawed and am now all set for a comfortable night.
Camp on slightly lower Puna. 7 October
A worrying day, though I’ve tried to conceal my forebodings from Rachel. This morning poor Juana went very lame. By then we were in relentlessly rugged country and we didn’t find this site until 10.30, by which time we’d covered scarcely six miles because Juana could only hobble. As neither of us knows anything about equine complaints we can’t make a diagnosis – there’s nothing visibly wrong with the leg or hoof. My fear is that she may not make it to Cuzco. And she has become such a beloved member of the team that neither of us, I suspect, would have the will to continue with another animal. This may sound sentimental, but when the going gets rough her unflappability gives us invaluable moral support. We wouldn’t swap her for a thoroughbred de Paso.
This is a perfect hospital site: almost-level acres of soft, springy turf on which Juana reclined all day in warm sunshine, with Rachel lying beside her reading The King’s War. Rachel is developing a heavy cold and would in any case have needed a rest-day; it’s odd how their indispositions coincide. To the west, smooth brown puna slopes up to meet the sky. To the east – and quite close, beyond a grassy ravine – stretches a ridge of gently curved mountains. To the north are sharp, dark, sheer peaks. To the south are more distant but no less ferocious summits, many snow-flecked.
At first sight, this seems an unpromising ‘fire-zone’. But if one persists the little bushes dotted about the semi-puna yield an adequate supply of dead-wood, though these thin twigs burn so fast in the lively breeze that cooking isn’t easy. Nearby, a clear brown stream races down a gully from the high puna; it may be riddled with campesinos’ bacteria but it looks so pristine that I’ve chanced not ‘pilling’ it – and so we feel we’re living it up on the Andean equivalent of champagne.
The locals are pathetic. There are seven scattered hovels on this gigantic ledge, all crudely built of stones and tree-trunks, and roofed with tousled thatches of puna grass. These seem not human creations but part of the earth, like badgers’ setts or foxes’ dens. I toured them this afternoon in search of food, as we may be marooned here for days. Around each are a few minuscule fields, providing just enough potatoes and bizarre root vegetables to keep the population alive – but not kicking. The average IQ of these Indians is tragically sub-normal; clearly anyone with any spark of intelligence has long since migrated. It was hard to tell the animal from the human quarters, except that in the latter a few ragged spare garments were draped over low rafters and a few basic cooking utensils and tin plates were stacked in corners. I had thought nothing could be more poverty-benumbed than the remoter villages of Baltistan but the Baltis live like sybarites compared to these Indians. Nobody here understands Spanish and the tendency is to hide as I approach. But I had success at the fifth hovel. Outside it a small boy, with open sores on his face, was apathetically playing with a thin puppy and a half-grown golden-haired pig. The pup and two other, curs barked hysterically at me. (Why do campesinos keep so many dogs, who often look better fed than their children?) The little fellow fled, whimpering with fear, and a moment later a woman wearing a stained black bowler hat, and carrying an infant on her back, rose out of the adjacent gorge – spinning automatically and surveying me expressionlessly. (From a distance she may have observed our setting up camp.) I tried to convey that my niño and I are stranded and need food – to wit, fifteen soles worth of potatoes. The woman wordlessly considered me and my proffered soles for long moments. Then she made a gesture inviting me to sit on a boulder in the yard, beside a tree-trunk pig trough in which a piglet was diligently working to scrape off a residue of dried food. Slowly she climbed an outside ladder to a locked attic room, excavated a key from the recesses of her variegated, filthy skirts, opened the door and disappeared. Ten minutes later she descended, with at least two stone of potatoes and Inca vegetables (I can never remember their names) in a wicker basket on her back. I held out an open bag, meaning her to give me fifteen soles worth. But she took the coins – looking at them rather bemusedly – signed to me to help myself and vanished into the house. Quite likely she had no idea of the value of fifteen soles. I took about a kilo of potatoes and vegetables and departed, being watched from behind a corner by the small boy.
These Inca roots have so many protuberances they can look like men, or birds, or beasts – or even red armadilloes with overlapping scales. We decided on miniature potatoes for this evening and I took them off to the stream to scrub them with Juana’s dandy-brush. Because of their size and the concrete quality of their adhering earth, this proved a lengthy process. But sitting beside a waterfall, surrounded by tall shrubs with dainty pink flowers, I found this domestic chore quite congenial. And Rachel appreciated the result. Noodles are fine, but they’re not characterful the way Murphys are.
As the sun set the temperature dropped melodramatically and I hustled Rachel – sneezing and coughing – into the tent. Then, for a little time, I sat on a rock, alone with a skyscape of pale delicate clouds interwoven with dark fearsome peaks. And, despite my worry about Juana, I felt a deep content.
Huari. 8 October
This morning Juana’s limp seemed better but Rachel’s cold was worse and threatening to go to her chest. So we decided to push on to Huari, where Juana could have medical attention and lots of Alf while Rachel rested in a hotel with three hot meals a day.
Soon it became apparent that Juana wasn’t really better; she couldn’t achieve more than an exhausting (for me) 2 mph. As every trekker knows, it is extraordinarily tiring to have to walk below one’s natural speed (in my case 3½ mph at this altitude).
Huari stands on a 9,500 foot ledge half-way up a mountain semi-encircled by a river gorge. This being fiesta-time throughout the sierra, Huari too is making whoopee and, as we approached the pueblo, I was affectionately embraced by several reeling campesinos who mistook me for a gringo hombre. One of these men was being led by a Shetland-sized ginger pony with a coat of tight, negroid-type curls; Juana at once fell in love with this adorable creature and wanted to follow him. It had been a showery morning and we entered Huari to an 1812-ish fanfare of thunder and fireworks; luckily Juana is untroubled by both noises.
This is a squalid town. Its rough narrow streets, some ‘quake-fissured down the centre, are strewn with litter and half-blocked by heaps of household refuse seething with flies and maggots. What was once an elegant main Plaza has been disfigured by a partially built ediface of singular hideousness, to replace an old ‘quake demolished church. In all the Plazas, tall beribboned poles are aflutter with tawdry bunting; and decorated shrines glitter in every corner; and hundreds of colourfully-clad campesinos are dancing and drinking to the music of portable harps and pipes and drums.
My dream of Huari as a problem-solving pueblo has not so far come true. There is no veterinario and the Alf supply is poor because there are so many campesino ponies in town for the fiesta. Also, Juana has to share a corral with five obsessionally greedy pigs who, left to themselves, would gobble her supper within moments. So this evening I had to sit with her for two hours, reading Pedro de Cieza de Leon by torchlight and aiming frequent kicks at porcine marauders.
The same. 9 October
Our flea-infested Hotel del Sol is another brash, anomalous post-’quake building, tinged with plastic – one feels chrome and strip-lighting may happen any day now. It has delusions of grandeur and is comparatively expensive: 180 soles for a cramped and filthy single room with a glazed window that won’t open. True, we haven’t washed for a month (apart from that effort in Conchucos) and our clothes are stinking; but other people’s filth is something else again … Today Rachel is so flea-bitten she looks like an acute measles case and I’m not much better. The waiters are welcoming and well-meaning but the food is repulsive. For supper last night we had luke-warm God-knows-what soup and half-cooked spaghetti with (in Rachel’s opinion) minced motor-tyres. In despair I went out and bought a bottle of vino (good: rose) for 300 soles. Today we ate among friendly campesinos in the covered market – a run-down Mercado, designed for more prosperity than Huari now enjoys. We each had five delicious meals (our camel trick again) for the price of one in the hotel. At almost every stall we passed, someone insisted on my sharing their gourd of fiesta chicha. I must by now have accumulated a representative selection of campesino bacteria; but for Rachel, there would be little point in ‘pilling’ our drinking-water.
Before dawn – I was out early to secure an adequate Alf-supply – the streets were littered with comatose revellers; and an hour later the beer-shops were doing a brisk trade in hairs-of-the-dog. Here we’ve seen many more men unconscious-drunk, sick-drunk and fighting-drunk than in Pomabamba. And many more Indians at the end of the poverty-tether, sitting slumped in corners – ragged, dirty, dull-eyed, chewing wads of coca and looking as though they might never stand up again.
During the fiesta, stall-holders not native to Huari sleep on the ground beside their merchandise, wrapped in ponchos, and before sunrise are displaying their wares. These include cheap shoes and clothes and plastic kitchen-goods; locks and tools and brightly dyed blankets; exotic fruits from the selva and even more exotic witch-doctors’ medicines – bark-strips, seeds, shells, stones, herbs, llamas’ foetuses, snake and alligator skins, puma pelts, preserved toucans and other colourful jungle birds, tortoise-shells, armadillo carcasses and various unidentifiable pelts and heads and paws and tails. Rachel was particularly fascinated by books entitled: Red Magic, White Magic, Green Magic and Black Magic. Had they been in English she would certainly have bought the lot. Other pamphlets and slim vols, poorly printed on bad paper, dealt with various quasi-magical remedies both for physical disease and family problems.
Alf was elusive this afternoon. But at last a kind old Indian lady sitting outside her house took pity on me and ordered her granddaughter to cut me fifty soles worth. Then I had trouble getting into the corral. But eventually Pedro arrived, an eleven-year-old who is the middle child in a family of fifteen and who entertained me this morning while I was guarding Juana’s breakfast. He looks, as do his siblings, wizened with hunger. To admit me, he climbed onto the twelve foot high corral wall, walked its length, jumped down at the door and rolled back the stone that had been holding it shut. A manoeuvre surely not beyond even an amateur thief during hours of darkness …
Pedro’s fifteen-year-old sister soon joined us. Teresa hopes to go to Lima University – a hope unlikely to be fulfilled. She is an attractive-looking girl (or could be if properly fed), but one is rarely impressed by the Indians’ IQ. Seventy years ago, the Bolivian Franz Tamayo – son of a pure Spanish hidalgo father and a pure Indian Aymara mother – wrote a passionate defence of the Andean Indians. (He was their first modern champion). But even Tamayo had to admit that ‘historically the Indian must be judged a small intelligence and a powerful will’. Many people blame coca-chewing for Indian stupidity, apathy and ultra-conservatism. (Already Teresa is chewing.) Others argue that only coca enables the campesinos to survive hard physical labour at high altitudes. Harold Osborne argued that ‘the Indian has consumed coca and chicha since the race was at the height of its glory and they cannot reasonably be supposed to have effects so different now from then’. But he was writing in 1951 and recent research has shown that in Inca times coca was cultivated only in small quantities, and for the exclusive use of Inca nobles, priests, curacas and – exceptionally – long-distance messengers who had to run up the sort of precipices we crawl up. This undemocratic ban on general coca-chewing was probably wise, given its effect on the unself-restrained peasantry. Some doubt if the ban worked, but remembering the Incas’ successful imposition of discipline at other levels there’s no reason to suppose they failed here. True, an Inca noble, Huaman Poma, wrote towards the end of the 16th century: ‘Our rulers were undoubtedly responsible for the widespread custom of chewing coca. This was supposed to be nourishing, but in my view it is a bad habit, comparable with the Spanish one of taking tobacco, and leads to craving and addiction’. By then, however, there was a powerful Spanish pro-coca lobby – racketeers who tried to influence the anti-coca Government authorities by arguing that this addiction was an immemorial vice which colonial legislation could not hope to eradicate. Probably Poma believed this propaganda. The settlers’ motives for encouraging coca addiction have been crisply outlined by John Hemming: ‘With the fall of the Inca empire anyone could buy the leaves, and the habit swept the native population of Peru … Coca plantations lay at the edge of the humid forests, thousands of feet below the natural habitat of the Andean Indians. This did not deter Spanish planters and merchants who made huge profits from the coca trade. They forced highland natives to leave their encomiendas and work in the hot plantations … Contemporary authorities estimated that between a third and half of the annual quota of coca-workers died as a result of their five-month service … King Philip said in a royal decree that coca was ‘an illusion of the devil’ in whose cultivation ‘an infinite number of Indians perish because of the heat and disease where it grows’. But the coca trade was too lucrative … Some coca plantations were yielding 80,000 pesos a year, and Acosta reckoned that the annual coca traffic to Potosi was worth a half a million pesos. Its protagonists defended the trade because it produced the only commodity that was highly prized by the natives. They argued that coca alone could inspire Indians to work for reward and to participate in a monetary economy’.
Coca may have been cultivated for use in the sierra as early as c.2000 BC, or so some people deduce from analyses of human faeces made recently by the Ayacucho Archaeological-Botanical Project. It was certainly in use centuries before the Incas took over in the 1470s. In the 2,000 year-old tombs and burial grounds of Peru’s coastal civilisations, coca leaves have been found in small pouches tied to mummies – woven bags almost identical to those from which we have seen the Indians taking their next wad. The Incas allowed women to squat in front of the sacred bush and strip the lance-head-shaped leaves which grow in pairs along jade-green twigs. But the Indians further north, in what is now Colombia, were superstitious about the baneful effects of menstruation and only men were allowed to harvest coca. (The Incas also employed only the natives of the low-lying valleys to work on the plantations.) To this day coca is regarded as a sacred plant and is used in ceremonies that by no stretch of theological ingenuity could be given a Christian veneer. If you want to placate a supernatural power, of any grade, the most effective offering is a lump of llama fat mixed with coca and burnt at midnight inside a circle of dried llama dung – the ashes to be scattered, while still hot, on the surface of a stream. Coca also has many genuinely valuable medicinal uses, which were familiar to the Indians long before 19th-century European doctors discovered its anaesthetising properties.
Several friends have requested postcards describing the effects on me of coca as used by the Indians. But although one can buy coca here in any licensed merchant’s shop, as one buys tobacco at home, I dare not risk another shackle – in addition to nicotine and alcohol.
Camp on Scrubland in Gorge. 10 October
When we heard that in Chavin there are two veterinarias and inexhaustible fields of Alf it seemed advisable to continue this morning, as Juana’s limp was better (though by no means cured) and Huari’s Alf supply is poor.
At noon we stopped for chicha outside a shack with a sheaf of dried wheat over the door – the local sign. Soon after, two valleys converged and our track followed a river; wide, fast, muddy-grey, its course marked by low trees. As we went upstream, flocks of raucous parakeets – the first we’ve seen – made emerald streaks against a cloudless blue sky. This was a hot, arid, uninhabited valley with pale grey precipices rising from the river. Looking back, our world seemed to be dominated by a mighty triangular rock-summit and, right up to the base of the triangle, someone had cultivated – on unbelievable slopes – several tiny, brilliant patches of barley. In the Andes Nature never repeats herself. Every turn of a path or valley reveals some original design exceeding the most outré imaginings of the most eccentric architect. When we were again facing the snows of the Cordillera Blanca we turned south, to follow the Rio Puccha to Chavin. On our left rose a sheer rock-wall: thousands of feet high, miles long, flat-topped, flawlessly smooth – one of the most spectacular geological phenomena I’ve ever seen.
We passed two shamlets, each with a small closed shop. An old man with a ghastly abscess on his cheek – the only person we met all afternoon – told us these had been closed for the past year. Towards sunset a solid tree-trunk bridge took us into this gaunt, river-noisy gorge where we began to worry about the total absence of either Juana-food or tent space. But soon we’d found this stony site, stocked with a brand of bushes which Juana eats when desperate. It was difficult to get the pegs in and as I struggled with them a sudden violent wind raged up the gorge and almost swept the tent away.
Chavin de Huantar. 11 October
An uneasy night for me, though Rachel slept throughout her own coughing. The tent was intolerably hot yet couldn’t be unzipped because of mosquitoes. Juana repeatedly wound her rope around bushes and had to be disentangled four times. (The ground was too hard for the picket.) I was very worried about her injury. The heat was aggravating my multitudinous flea-bites. And – most unsettling of all – two bus-trucks passed, covering the camp with fine dust. Their unfamiliar roaring and rattling, reechoing throughout the gorge for twenty minutes, seemed a monstrous desecration. Huari is at the end of a new dry-weather road that passes through Chavin.
We were off at 6.50, walking with a small boy and a large dog who had attached themselves to us as we were striking camp. When we came to an Alf field high above the road the boy requisitioned five kilos from his grandfather, who was cutting an armful for the family cow. Here the gorge had broadened and a few dwellings were visible. While Juana breakfasted we sat on a boulder showing Juan our maps, which he seemed to regard as some form of gringo magic.
Last evening, as we supped, a worried young man cantered down-stream with his small son on his pommel, clutching the pony’s mane. He asked if we had noticed a straying donkey mare and foal; an hour later I was sad to see him returning by moonlight without them. Now he reappeared, on foot, and suggested that Juana should finish her Alf in his corral, while we breakfasted with his family. Javier is slim and dark-skinned, with strange green eyes, quick supple movements and a diffident smile. He worked for an American company in Lima until it withdrew from Peru ten months ago. Repeatedly we find that the most out-going campesinos are ‘Lima-returned’.
The corral doorway, in a long, high mud wall, was just wide enough to take Juana’s load. Inside, Javier’s Lima-born wife, Maria – poised, friendly, good-looking – sat on a boulder in a corner of the yard frying potatoes over a picnic-style wood-fire. Javier’s mother, younger sister and two older brothers were killed in the 1970 ’quake on their way back from market. His father – squatting in a patch of early sunshine, aimlessly knotting and unknotting a leather thong – ignored us. He hasn’t smiled since the ‘quake, said Javier. In the inner corral the surviving brother, who is slightly retarded, was struggling to milk an abnormally large Friesan-type cow – all the time restless and kicking. Her bawling nine-month-old calf was tied nearby and is still allowed to suck twice a day in the belief that this stimulates the milk-flow. Eventually Javier had to hold the bucket for his brother. Diagonally across the yard from the fire was a ‘bee-hive’ mud bread-oven, similar to those we saw in Mexico. The hens lay beneath this, in a space accessible only to children; Rachel found one egg. The yard swarmed with life: hens, ducks, turkeys, several furry pigs, three friendly dogs, a cat and four minute kittens, a dozen chirping guinea-pigs. For breakfast we each had a small plate of fried potatoes topped with a fried egg and followed by a cup of new milk, boiled and heavily sugared. As we ate, Maria told me that her parents had migrated to the coast from the nearby village of San Marcos, where many of her relatives still live. She misses some of the conveniences of city life but for the children’s sake is glad to have moved to the ancestral sierra, where at least a bare sufficiency of food is available to farmers as ‘prosperous’ as Javier. She fed the year-old with his egg: Javier, a doting father, fed the two-and-a-half-year-old. Father and brother did not join us in the tiny, neat dining-room, sparsely furnished but decorated with tourist posters of Lima and Arequipa.
Javier emphasised what a splendidly rich and privileged country Peru is – or could be, if well governed. An intelligent young man, he has been grievously disillusioned by listening to daily Lima gossip about government mismanagement and corruption. He informed us that ninety nine per cent of Peru’s wealth is owned by one per cent of the population: an exaggeration horribly near the truth. I asked if he had ever considered joining a political movement to help clean up the scene. He shrugged “There is no place in politics for an honest man. I was sad when my job went because I would have got on and made nice money for my children” – he kissed his elder son’s head. “But maybe it is better for them to grow up in the sierra where people are honest. It is another world here. No one will trick you. And like Maria said, we have just enough food if we have no big drought. And we will try to have no more children, so these two can have what there is. But here it is not easy to get medicines for that.”
Today poor Juana is so crippled that the eight easy miles to Chavin took us four and a half hours. We stopped for a bowl of chicha in the little pueblo of San Marcos, also at present celebrating its fiesta with bunting and masked bands everywhere and dozens of drunks lying around at 11 a.m. Sitting imbibing on a doorstep, we attracted a group of friendly schoolgirls who had the usual heated argument about whether I’m a man or a woman. (The sartorial evidence and my deep voice both support the former theory.) Leaving the town, we saw one particularly gruesome fight. A pisco-maddened young man – we could smell the fumes – had badly beaten up his elderly opponent whose lower lip was split open to the chin-bone and pouring blood. As we passed, the older man’s legs buckled and he sank into the ditch. Whereupon the young victor laughed and swaggered away, wiping his bloody fists on his trousers. A moment later a terrified campesino woman – wife of the vanquished – emerged from behind a dry stone wall and tried to stop the flow of blood. When we approached, intending to offer some disinfectant, she made it plain that she wished for no gringo interference.
From San Marcos, the white, dusty, stony track climbs gradually through a broad, rugged valley. Never have I felt so unhappy about an animal and so impatient to arrive at a destination. My eyes searched the broken terrain ahead, but it’s never possible to guess where these Andean pueblos may be or how far away they are when first one glimpses them.
Then suddenly we were overlooking Chavin, tucked away at the base of a massive mountain, its red roofs straggling for a mile or so between river and cliffs, its Plaza green and well-kept – and many fields of Alf visible around the edges. This is an important archaeological site and the tourist authorities are trying to ‘develop’ the town, with little success to date as there is no reliable approach road. A steady trickle of gringoes arrives from Huaras by truck-bus during the dry season, but the majority are enterprising young back-packers rather than conventional tourists.
As we were coaxing Juana along a narrow street of two-storeyed adobe dwellings a pisco-drunk young man molested me, grabbing the leading-rope and demanding plata. I was feeling so on edge about Juana that I over-reacted and punched him unnecessarily, but he wouldn’t release the rope and we were in danger of doing real mischief to each other when a prosperous-looking gentleman on a Honda intervened with threatening shouts. The many campesino witnesses had of course been assiduously ignoring the fracas.
A young policeman helped us to find the veterinario, to whom we both took an instant dislike. After a superficial examination this burly mestizo chancer said Juana needs only a few days rest and shoeing, which is nonsense; some serious damage has by now been done. Tomorrow morning we’ll consult the second veterinario, who is ‘out of town’ today.
At 3.30 we had ‘lupper’ in the Comidor Chavin, an eating-house run by the local Co-op at one end of the Plaza. We sat where we could watch Juana grazing on a small patch of juicy grass behind the church, an ugly, oblong, grey building rather like a warehouse. This Comidor is bright, spacious, newish, cleanish and friendly. While we ate plates of delicious rice, fried with tomatoes, onions and chopped goat-meat, the young manageress brushed her teeth vigorously at a small hand-basin by the well-stocked bar and told us we would be comfortable in the Hotel Inca on the opposite side of the Plaza.
She was right. This is a delightful doss-house, with no pretensions to being anything else; our windowless, mud-floored room would probably be outlawed as a stable by EEC regulations. It is one of a row leading directly off a wide yard inhabited by the usual selection of animals, plus three litters of enchanting baby rabbits. And it has two beds. Admittedly, only one is supplied with a mattress, the other consisting of bare, rusty springs. On the far side of the yard, beside the al fresco dining area, there is a WC. But as it’s permanently without W this cannot be reckoned a mod. con. And Rachel is not impressed by the overflowing container behind the door in which used lavatory paper must be deposited. “I think we’ll go out to the mountain”, she said rather faintly. Water for all household purposes comes from a deep well beside our room. There is a tiny outside hand-basin with a tap, but again that tap merely portends a more technological future.
So far all our Chavin contacts have been most sympathetic about poor Juana. (Except the one who counts – the veterinario.) She is now safely corralled on a patch of lush grass behind a little building in which the town’s electricity is (or not, as the case may be) generated. The two men in charge of this delicate operation have advised us to soak her feet in aguarras (turps) twice a day. And one of them left his post to show us a minute shop down a side-street where we could buy this medicament.
Chavin is at 9,500 feet, with a perfect climate and hot sulphur springs nearby, in grottoes by the river, where we can wash ourselves and our clothes every day. We can think of nowhere more congenial for a rest-halt of indefinite length.