Camp beside Restaurant on Motor-Road. 18 November
It was 10.30 before we had extricated ourselves from the farewell hospitality of a series of Jauja friends. Teresa made a significant remark as we were leaving: “It’s only an hour’s bus ride to Huancayo so you’ll be there early this afternoon”. Huancayo is thirty miles from Jauja and we are on foot. This sums up what is wrong with the mental processes of many Peruvians.
Today’s fifteen miles ran straight and level through densely populated (almost one hundred per cent Indian) countryside where the many villages are set back from the road amidst aromatic pine-groves. This broad valley produces forty per cent of all Peru’s wheat and we saw a few small tractors; but family groups still do most of the work. The fact that an all-Indian population produces so much of the national wheat crop in such a small area surely proves that given a chance the indigenous people are not lazy, whatever else. The larger fields were sheltered on four sides by tall eucalyptus trees, and amidst the cacti hedges broom flowered brilliantly. We may not care for tarred roads and telegraph wires, but it lightens the heart to see so much simple ‘appropriate’ – prosperity in the Andes.
We are camping on a wide, humpy patch of grass between the carretera and a new jerry-built restaurant. The Indian proprietor wouldn’t allow us to pay for our supper though the bill came to over 200 soles. Rachel regards this as a Red-letter evening; for the first time in Peru we have been able to buy fresh milk, which she misses as much as I miss cheese.
Camp on verge of Ploughed Field. 19 November
An unquiet night. Three parties of drunks leaving the restaurant fell over the guy-ropes. The motor-traffic was heavy, fast and much given to horn-blowing. The local dogs fought apparently incessantly, only pausing to howl at the moon. And when torrential rain fell during the small hours the tent sagged and leaked.
Pedro de Cieza de León described this valley as ‘one of the finest things in Peru’. He wouldn’t if he could see it now. For miles, approaching Huancayo, urban squalor disfigures the landscape – rusty tins, broken bottles, filthy sheets of newspaper. And the walls of countless shoddy but pretentious new ‘villas’ are daubed with political graffiti. And wayside crosses commemorating the victims of bad driving are more numerous than kilometre stones, though this tarred road is smooth and straight.
For an hour we were walking through the hot, dusty, litter-strewn, fume-poisoned city. In the centre a large area had been cordoned off for a Communist Party demonstration; at least 3,000 enthusiastic student-types were hoping to hear impassioned speeches but it was rumoured that the speakers had been arrested on their way from Lima and Cuzco. Hundreds of police, wearing full riot gear and brandishing machine-guns, stood between the demonstrators and the surrounding spectators. Several senior officers were patrolling the nearby streets, idly toying with their revolvers and warning people not to join the demonstrators as there was going to be trouble. These hard-faced nasties were quite unlike the ‘village bobbies’ we’ve been meeting. Our arrival infuriated them and they curtly ordered us to leave Huancayo at once. For the first time, I was aware of being in a dictatorship – and not liking it. Some gene to do with the liberty of the individual took over, and for the next half-hour we dodged about on the edge of the demo., pretending not to understand the increasingly irate officers. They were urban types, and clearly afraid of Juana, so they never came too close. Amongst the crowd there was much sympathy for the demonstrators, not because they were communist but because they were brave enough to defy the junta. Yet the fact of such a demonstration being allowed to assemble – even if the speakers were arrested – and the other fact of gringoes being able to ignore police orders with impunity, indicate that this Peruvian dictatorship is not among the world’s worst. Indeed, Peruvian governments, whether civilian or military, and however deplorable by our standards, have traditionally been among the more humane Latin American regimes.
Beyond Huancayo a quiet dirt-road took us onto a wide, windy plateau where every square foot of land was ploughed. Alas! no Alf grew amidst all these pale brown fields, some already green-tinged by sprouting wheat. So tonight our mula has only a sack of maize-straw (which she despises) bought in the nearby village of Huacrapuquio.
Hovel on High Pass. 20 November
A day of extraordinary contrasts, with an unfortunate ending. By 8.30 we had climbed into a high green valley and descended into a low green valley, very narrow between intensively cultivated mountains. Here three girls, driving sheep to the puna, obligingly cut Juana a sheaf of grass on the valley floor. They would accept no payment: it was “a present from the local Co-op”.
Easy reduras took us in and out of three more valleys, past several shamlets and through much cultivation onto the puna. There we passed a huge herd of half-wild ponies and foals: an unusual sight. We were back on the dirt-road, at 12,000 feet, when the sky suddenly darkened while continuous rumbles of distant thunder sounded like the rolling of ghostly battle-drums.
For two hours our road climbed along the desolate flanks of almost-sheer mountains, their rock-crests supporting charcoal clouds. Then another turn brought us to an area where less precipitous slopes were teeming with activity as families ploughed tiny stone-walled fields. From here our road was visible for miles ahead, climbing to a high pass marked by a few tiny hovels. That last stage was not enjoyable; a hail-laden gale opposed us. And when at last we reached the pass a solid-seeming wall of sleet was moving towards us across the stark barrenness that stretched ahead. We rejoiced to see that one of the hovels described itself as ‘Bar-Restaurant’. Motor roads have their compensations.
We gratefully accepted Aurora’s invitation to spend the night on the bar floor; the blizzard then shrieking across the pass was the most severe weather we’ve encountered in Peru. I corralled Juana behind the hovel where a lean-to provided some shelter; Aurora had assured us that after the blizzard we could buy fodder in the nearby village of Tongos. While I was clumsily unloading with numb fingers, several men and women taunted me – behaviour quite out of character with what we have hitherto seen of the campesinos. These mestizos were potato planters, huddling in the shelter of the corral wall, and when Aurora heard their jeering she rushed out to pour vials of Quechuan wrath upon them – which they ignored.
Aurora is a remarkable young woman, an Indian of what I think of as ‘the Inca type’. Taller than the average campesino, she has a thin narrow face, an aquiline nose, ebony hair worn in a bun, bright quick eyes and a touch of haughtiness that could seem out of place – yet somehow doesn’t – as she stands behind a homemade bar-counter against a backdrop of almost-empty shelves. This two-roomed shack is a family enterprise; Aurora’s brothers built it five years ago, using stones gathered off the mountain. Not too many soles were needed to buy tin for the roof (thatch might put off the passing motor-traffic) and father made the shelving, counter, table and benches. For a time business was brisk and all the shelves were full; nowadays Aurora sells only a powerful home-distilled aguardiente (quite unlike anything else I’ve ever tasted) and meals based on home-grown ingredients. Listening to her story, that tired phrase ‘and the poor are getting poorer’ came suddenly to life. The room behind the bar is the family dwelling: a mere cubby-hole, but Aurora has only one son – Alfredo, aged six – and intends to have no more. The views of her meek husband, Victor, who works on his father’s land, were not mentioned.
By 4.30 the blizzard was over and as the sky cleared Victor arrived home, his boots leaking, his poncho saturated, his teeth chattering. At once he had to adjust the roof; it had gone agley during the storm though held down by heavy stones. I then found a patch of coarse brown grass and while picketing Juana was approached by two youths who had been sitting in the doorway of the neighbouring hovel. I distrusted them on sight and their questions about our future movements got short answers. When I returned to the bar Aurora denounced them as “muy malo” Victor was at his evening meal, a plate piled with boiled potatoes. He is a diffident, kindly young man who worships his wife and son and seems somewhat in awe of the former.
I relished my solitary walk to Tongos, a two-mile descent along one wall of a steeply sloping ravine. As Tongos is too high for Alf I could find only poor quality oats which I humped in our sack. Carrying such a weight uphill made me aware of the altitude. By then it was dark and fiercely cold, yet the icy fires that burned overhead made clear my path.
Bewilderment was my first reaction when Juana, snuffling excitedly, came towards me. Then I realised that the picket had been stolen, almost certainly by our inquisitive neighbours. “It’s such a mean thing to steal!” exclaimed Rachel. And indeed every campesino knows that on the puna, where an animal can’t be tethered, a picket is the most essential of all pieces of equipment. Juana would never desert us now, but one remembers that dead pony near Huanuco … Aurora and Victor were humiliated and enraged, though not surprised. This means a forced march tomorrow, to the nearest pueblo.
The same. 21 November
I had just written the above, and was about to dislodge three pet hens from my flea-bag and go to bed, when loud voices approached and impatient fists battered on the tin door. Frowning, Aurora unlocked it and a dozen young men crowded in. Assuming that they were in search of refreshment, I hastily cleared the table of my literary impedimenta, placing everything on the bench beside me. The young men, however, had not come to imbibe but to investigate the gringoes. And their remarks were provoking Aurora and Victor to tense resentment. Yet clearly our friends were also a little fearful; they made no attempt to eject the intruders when they gathered round me shouting questions in an incomprehensible mixture of Quechua and Spanish. The small dark room – some sixteen feet by ten, its only lighting a flickering wick in a tiny coffee-tin of oil – now seemed even smaller. I kept half an eye on our gear, piled in a corner beside a barrel of kerosene. Some of the men were slightly drunk, but not their chief spokesman, Rodrigo, whom I’d briefly met in Tongos – a swarthy, smarmy character with broken teeth and curly tangled hair. When he sat opposite me two of his companions sat beside me, leaning forward and turning sideways to stare into my face. At first Rodrigo pretended to be welcoming and helpful, in a blatantly insincere way. Then abruptly he demanded our passports and documents. My immediate reaction was to ignore this impertinence, but tension was heightening in the room – for reasons I couldn’t understand – and from the shadows Aurora vigorously signalled to me to be co-operative. Slowly, by the light of his own torch, Rodrigo thumbed through the two green booklets and the sheaf of Cajamarca documents. Then, rather disconcertingly, he produced one page of a school exercise book and a stub of pencil and began to make notes. Even more disconcertingly, he suddenly looked up, shone his torch in my eyes and asked accusingly why our visas had expired two months ago – a detail I had long since forgotten. Perhaps he was – however outlandish the notion – some sort of local official who would confiscate our passports. I leant forward and snatched them back and at once the atmosphere became so nasty that I felt glad Rachel was asleep. Several of the men who had been standing behind Rodrigo, leaning over his shoulder and advising him while he made his notes, produced their own torches and shone them in my eyes, shouting abusively at me. It was, I judged, time to switch off co-operation and try something else. Jumping up, I banged my fist on the table, pointed to the door and said – “Marcharse!” (“Go away!”). There was a sudden, complete silence. And then they went, just like that.
Victor was shaking with fright, Aurora taut with rage. I asked if Rodrigo held some minor post and learned that he has recently done time for attempting to smuggle cocaine into Miami, which explains his visa-spotting. Your average campesino has never heard of a visa.
I turned then to pick up my torch – and discovered that both our torches had been stolen from the bench beside me. This was infuriating; mine – a heavy waterproof specimen – will be impossible to replace in Peru. But my fury was as nothing to Aurora’s. She exploded in volcanic Quechua, then thrust the key of the ‘till’ (a small wooden box) into my hand, told me to look after the bar and disappeared with a reluctant Victor into the icy black night – I then supposed in courageous pursuit of the thief.
Bemused, I found myself in a new role: behind a bar, carefully measuring out glasses of aguardiente for two gnarled campesinos who had appeared from God knows where and obviously didn’t believe I was real. They seemed to speak no Spanish. The evening was becoming more unlikely by the minute.
At 10.50 Aurora and Victor returned, breathless, from Tongos. They had been organising a denuncia, which apparently is a legal device of some potency. By that stage I felt too exhausted to probe further. The hens protested with sleepy squawks when I moved them. Most hens perch on things but this lot like lying around and I’d no sooner wriggled into bed than they were roosting on my legs.
An hour or so later, Aurora shook me awake, with difficulty. I was to do my denuncia bit, prontitudo. Again the room was full of men; but these were the Goodies, loudly lamenting the misdeeds of the Baddies. The hens hardly bothered to squawk as I crawled out of my warm tunnel: they were adjusting to their rough night. Rachel opened unseeing eyes, smiled seraphically, then turned over:
It was 12.30 a.m. Aurora handed me half a tumbler of aguardiente (equivalent to about half a pint of whiskey) and introduced me to Garcia, the Governor of Tongos – a rather grand title for a slightly obsequious old man in ragged trousers, a patched poncho and broken boots. He, assisted by his five henchmen, would write down my denuncia, and sign it, and seal it. Then very early tomorrow (i.e., today) Aurora and Victor, as witnesses of the crime (which of course they hadn’t witnessed) would accompany me to Pampas’s comisaría where we would present our denuncia to the police, make sworn statements and await appropriate action. By evening we and our torches would certainly be reunited. When I tried feebly to point out that I was far more concerned about the picket than the torches, Aurora brushed this irrelevance aside. She was gunning for Rodrigo & Co. – not for her unsavoury neighbours, much as she dislikes them. Her dedication to the recovery of stolen property is admirable, but it’s plain that we’ve now become pawns in some complex local feud which I can’t begin to understand – partly because all details are discussed in Quechua. We only know what we’re told, which insufficiently explains a rumpus more suited to the theft of the Koh-i-noor than to the pilfering of two electric torches.
For lack of practice, it takes the average literate campesino a very, very long time to read anything, and even longer to write it. Moreover, Peruvians of every race and class have a strong weakness for bureaucracy. It was not clear to me why my denuncia had to contain a list of the contents of our pannier-bags and details of Juana’s age, height, colour, brand, price, place of birth, previous owner, date of purchase … That, somehow, provided the evening’s final touch of surrealism.
At 1.45 I thanked the Goodies, emptied my second half tumbler of aguardiente and tottered back to my roost. Some time later torches were shone on my face and the Goodies courteously wished me good-night. And not long after Aurora was briskly arousing me with the news that before leaving for Pampas we must go to Tongos to see another crucially important official who was not available last night.
It was 5.05 a.m. and I had an aguardiente hang-over, which is like none other. Icy air was knifing through gaps left by the cardboard that blocked the little window above our flea-bags. Rachel – all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed – was longing to be brought up to the minute on recent events. The intrinsic lunacy of the whole enterprise, from our point of view, became even more apparent as I gave her a brief outline. “D’you really believe the Peruvian police will find our torches?” she asked. “No,” I replied.
We took Juana with us, to spend the day in the greater safety of Aurora’s parents’ corral. By 6.30 we were in Diego’s patio, where a baby girl, stark naked and filthy, was crawling around in the dust with two striped piglets and a starved-looking pregnant bitch. Diego’s wife squatted in the sunny corner spinning and humming quietly; she looked several pence short of the shilling. I never did discover who Diego is or why we were there; at that stage I was wholly preoccupied by the novel sensations within my head. Aurora, occasionally backed by Victor, treated our host (or inquisitor, or whatever he was) to a Quechua monologue of considerable ferocity and eloquence. At the end she turned to me, pleading for corroboration. I recklessly nodded – and then winced. Diego stretched out a hand, requesting our passports and documents. Expressionlessly he pondered them, before asking – this was the ultimate non sequitur – how many languages my books have been translated into. “Not many, and I can’t remember which,” I said inadequately. “Japanese, Hungarian and Czech”, said Rachel. Diego stared at her disbelievingly. Aurora seized my arm and said, “Write that down!” Diego handed me a scrap of paper and a biro. I began to suspect that I was still asleep and this was the sort of dream you have after too much aguardiente. “Write it down!” repeated Aurora. I wrote down ‘Japanese’ and ‘Hungarian’, then wondered despairingly how to spell ‘Czech’ – but realised after a moment it didn’t terribly matter. Diego ordered me to sign the scrap of paper and he laboriously witnessed it before tucking it away under his poncho. I decided that undoubtedly I was dreaming. Diego stood up (the rest of us had been standing all the time: nobody asked us to sit down) and assured me that when I had brought him the necessary documents from the police and the attorney’s office the local community court would retrieve our torches. Disguising my total disbelief, I made mumbling noises of gratitude and admiration and we departed.
On the packed bus to Pampas the landscape was invisible. As we hurtled around dozens of hair-pin bends I tried not to think about the only too imaginable ravines to left or right. At a police checkpoint on the edge of the town two young men passengers were arrested, charged with cocaine-running and taken away literally in chains. Aurora watched, thin-lipped. “They are friends of Rodrigo,” she said.
Resigned to my pawn status, I made no effort to follow the proceedings as Aurora led us in and out of three cramped, twilit attorneys’ offices full of litigious campesinos brooding over grievances and desiccated clerks filling out forms in triplicate. (One could write a tome about the grotesque functions of the attorney in Peruvian society – but I won’t.) I obediently signed when and where I was told; for all I knew, I might have been signing my own death-warrant. At the newish and surprisingly large police station Aurora’s tactics suddenly changed. Thrusting the denuncia and a sheaf of attorneys’ documents into my hand, she instructed me to become very angry and insist on immediate and drastic police action. Then she and Victor effaced themselves, squatting against the wall outside while I entered the first of a series of offices and confronted the first of a series of uninterested and slow-witted police officers. Here bureaucracy reached a crescendo: a detailed description of the next three hours would sound like exaggeration – to anyone unfamiliar with Peru. Finally Aurora and Victor were summoned and closely questioned; in the presence of the police Aurora became unexpectedly deferential. But she achieved her aims. The senior officer signed and stamped my denuncia, and our attorneys’ papers, and gave us an impressive seal-strewn document for Garcia, and another for Diego, delegating to them the responsibility for retrieving stolen property. After all that effort, Aurora was deeply wounded to see me trying to buy replacement torches in the Mercado. She seems genuinely to believe in the ultimate efficacy of her crusade against Rodrigo.
I had crassly assumed that Aurora and Victor would avail of their free bus trip to do some shopping in the metropolis, but when I suggested this Aurora said simply – “We have no money to buy things in a town.” And it was obvious that neither she nor Victor knew their way around Pampas, their nearest pueblo. Eventually however we found a blacksmith who made a picket by thrusting an eighteen-inch iron bar into his furnace, bending the top and sharpening the end – ten minutes work which cost 300 soles. And the result was neither as convenient nor as secure as our stolen Mexican picket.
We waited on the edge of the town, opposite the police station, for whatever transport might materialise to take us home. Soon two young soldiers joined us, going to Tongos on leave, and then an aged and infirm campesino couple, leaning on sticks. The first vehicle to appear was a smart new Dodge van; it stopped and we all climbed into the open empty back. The driver was a plump, sleek mestizo with gold teeth and a gold tie-pin and a fur-lined coat; when there was a slight delay, because of the old couple being stiff in the joints, he shouted at us as though we were cattle. Then suddenly he realised that he had two gringoes on board. Jumping out, he switched on the charm, swept off his fur-lined cap, bowed and beamed and invited us to sit in front with him. He spoke fluent English and went rigid with horror when I suggested that the old couple should have the seats: this was not on … So I informed him that we would stay with our friends in the back. That grim journey took only thirty-five minutes because our driver never slackened speed, even on the most perilous stretches of a narrow, boulder-strewn, uneven track with thousand foot drops beyond the verge. The bumping was so violent that we avoided broken bones only by bracing ourselves against each other as we cowered in a miserable heap on the metal floor. The cold was intense, yet had we been walking it would have seemed a warm sunny afternoon. Why do so many gringoes choose to travel through the Andes by bus or truck? Our own thick cloud of dust obscured the landscape and almost suffocated us; this evening I’m still dust-encased, hoarse and sore-eyed, and my brown Husky jacket is silver. (Here no washing water is available: from this pass it’s a forty-minute walk to the nearest stream.) Outside the bar, our driver insolently demanded 100 soles from each passenger though 25 soles is the standard charge for the journey. He was a not uncommon mestizo type, too contemptuous of Indians to sit beside them yet quick to profit from their needs. I gave him 200 soles for the eight fares and told him to get lost.
We paused only to collect Alfredo – Aurora’s father was behind the bar today – then hastened down to Tongos where Rachel, Alfredo and I stayed with Juana while Aurora and Victor distributed the documents. I was beginning to feel rather bored by the whole charade. The aguardiente had shifted its scene of activity from my head to my guts and my stomach was throbbing in the oddest way; I’ve never before had a hang-over in that area.
We sat leaning against a colossal boulder in a sunny corner of the open yard – today has been cloudless – and Aurora’s mother and two sisters prepared wads of coca for themselves, and a smaller wad for the six-year-old Alfredo; they urged Rachel and me to try a chew but we declined with thanks. I was worrying about Juana, tethered nearby on a useless llama-cropped patch of grass. The local fodder is poor and during these cold nights she is losing the flesh she put on in Jauja.
When Aurora and Victor reappeared it was plain that something had gone seriously wrong. Aurora erupted in Quechua to her family; she was spitting with rage. Victor smiled sheepishly at me, then bent down and whispered that Diego and Garcia were demanding a ‘legal fee’ of 500 soles each before acting on the denuncia. You could buy ten torches for 1,000 soles. I stood up and said that I must get back to the bar and do some writing. Aurora turned to me then, her fine eyes flashing, and ordered me to go to the government in Lima and have Garcia and Diego sacked. They are, it seems, Baddies in Goodies’ clothing. They have no respect for the government, for the police, for famous foreign writers, for Aurora, for Peru’s reputation abroad. I shrugged, said “Adios!” to everybody and stumped away up the mountain followed by Rachel – and Alfredo, who hero-worships the gringita. He looks like a frail three-year-old but is extremely bright. On the way home he volunteered the names of every shrub, flower, grass and herb en route. Pretty impressive. Sadly, this brightness will soon have been dimmed forever by coca-chewing.
Aurora and Victor returned only ten minutes ago, looking mollified. Apparently Diego and Garcia, on hearing of my attitude to ‘legal fees’, and my threats to complain about them to the government (!), decided to act on the denuncia for free. So Aurora is confident that by tomorrow evening we’ll have our torches back. At first she was crest-fallen when I explained that we can wait here no longer because Juana urgently needs Alf Then she solved that problem: on our way through Pampas the day after tomorrow we can pick up our property from the police station. She seems certain that the torches can be retrieved; and of course she knows more than we do about the methods of the community court.
Camp on Mountain-ledge by small Lake. 22 November
I hadn’t realised, so distorting is motor transport, that another, still higher pass lies between Aurora’s Pass (as we have understandably named it) and Pampas. As we were climbing towards it, soon after sun-rise, we saw several wriggling heaps of thousands of black and orange caterpillars. Other thousands were processing over the short grass and herbs in single file, their lines extending both ways as far as we could see – a remarkable spectacle and all happening above 13,500 feet. Here too grew an enchanting blue and white minuscule flower – its tiny perfection most wondrous and also a glorious rose-pink flowering cactus. Approaching the pass, we saw two small, distant herds of sheep and llamas.
Then we were overlooking the still-remote Pampas valley – and beyond it our next obstacle, a contorted grey-brown mountain massif, filled the whole southern sky. We were almost level with its multiple summits and Rachel remarked that it would be convenient if Juana were a Pegasus-type. I agreed – not for reasons of transport, since I enjoy downing and upping in the Andes, but because we had run out of water and a hoof-conjured fountain would have been most welcome on our Mount Helicon.
At 2.30 we saw an expanse of best quality puna grass on a ledge some fifty feet above the track. With the rains imminent (probably), we are now anxious to keep up a daily average of 20–25 miles: but you can’t do that with a starving mule. So we set up camp here, beside a still black lake at the foot of a long, golden-grassed ridge with battlements of silver rock. Today too was cloudless and the afternoon sun permitted us to lie out on the soft level turf. For an hour we wood-gathered, climbing down the almost vertical slope beyond the track in search of suitable dead scrub. (Some species won’t burn.) We were drinking hot soup as the sun set, leaving a delicate glow of merging pastel shades above royal-blue mountains. (There should be some stronger word than ‘mountains’ for the Andes; after all, even in Ireland we have things called ‘mountains’ …) The stars came out – here so lustrous, alive, close – while the fire was settling to a shimmering crimson hillock. Then Rachel played her fideog, which is hardly distinguishable from the Indian pipe, and the mountains seemed to listen. On all the immensity of their slopes, no light twinkles; even the campesinos are defeated by such precipices.
Pampas Police Station. 23 November
Last night’s heavy rain became a Celtic drizzle towards dawn, then stopped. We were away by 6.30, our road overlooking wide gorges where, far below, silver masses of shifting cloud were gently coiling and drifting, dissolving and reshaping, in a soundless unearthly ballet – one of the loveliest visions I have ever seen.
Pampas police station, overlooking a level grassy common, happens to be the first building one comes to. I dreaded being caught up once more in the inscrutable movements of its bureaucratic machine and was disposed to march briskly past. But then we saw familiar figures sitting hunched dejectedly on the wide steps that lead up to incongruous glass double doors. “Baddies!” hissed Rachel. And so they were: three of Rodrigo’s friends, including the two who sat beside me in the bar when our torches were stolen. They ignored us as we walked up the steps.
We were courteously greeted by a tallish, handsome young officer, impeccably uniformed – not one of those we’d already met. Pedro spoke reasonably good English and assured us that investigations were proceeding satisfactorily. Soon our antorchas would arrive from Tongos, escorted by Aurora and Victor. I stared at him disbelievingly. “You mean you’ve found them?” “No, no!” said Pedro. “We haven’t – but the village people are in charge. You will see how it is. The village people have their own ways.” It was only 10.45 but clearly we couldn’t walk off stage at this point. We unloaded Juana, stacked our gear in the hallway and went in search of fodder.
At noon Aurora, Victor, Aurora’s father and three more Baddies, looking sullen and angry, arrived in the back of a truck-bus. But no one was bearing antorchas. A verbally violent Quechuan confrontation then took place on the common by the steps; the five Goodies, the six Baddies and five policemen all spoke together, apparently ignoring each other’s statements, accusations, arguments. Finally two policemen and three Baddies were despatched to Tongos by whatever transport they could find and Pedro informed me that it was only a matter of time … Antorchas would come because the remaining Baddies were being kept as hostages. And indeed the three had to spend the rest of the day carrying loads of heavy builders’ rubble from the police corral to the nearest ravine, at least a mile away. In these parts there’s no hifalutin nonsense about first proving your man guilty.
The hours passed slowly. We treated our friends to lunch in the Mercado, took Juana to the blacksmith, fodder-hunted and explored Pampas in depth – not a richly rewarding experience. At sunset I asked permission to camp behind the police station and Pedro invited us to spend the night in what is quaintly known as the ‘Casino’, a large room at the back of the station containing only a never-used table-tennis table and two rusty, punctured bicycles leaning against one wall under a coloured photograph of the junta. And still no antorchas … organised a doss-house for Aurora and Victor – now both in a panic about Alfredo, who has never before been left all night without either parent. Then I smuggled two bottles of cerveza into the casino, where Rachel was already asleep on the concrete floor, and entertained Pedro. When he joined the police force three years ago, after graduating from San Marcos University, he had ambitions – now withering – to improve its efficiency and reduce corruption. He said the police are at present being pushed into the background by the army, which development is creating much resentment within the force and much unease among the general public. “If revolution comes,” he said, “there’s no doubt whose side the police will be on!” But he thinks revolution unlikely – “Peru is still stable enough to change governments without widespread disorder. We are not Bolivians!”
As I was changing the picket, at 8.30, what looked like a satellite appeared high up in the sky, moving slowly through the blackness. It was in fact a vehicle crawling down from ‘Aurora’s Pass’. Half an hour later the truck stopped outside. In the hallway, Pedro and I met the two policemen, Rodrigo and another Baddie who was carrying a large bundle of dirty blankets. This he carefully unrolled on the desk in the front room, to reveal – how wrong we’d been! – antorchas, in perfect working order. Pedro nodded casually and said something dismissive. The two policemen saluted and went off to their sleeping quarters. Rodrigo and his aide, eyes to the ground, turned and slouched away into the night. Pedro handed me a document to sign acknowledging receipt of recovered property. “But how were they found?” I asked, signing with a flourish. Pedro smiled. “They weren’t found: the thief was persuaded to give them up.” “But how?” I persisted.
Pedro sighed. “It is hard for me to explain and for you to understand. These people are very superstitious. They believe still in all kinds of spells and omens and bad luck. They understand very little about the rest of the world. They are easy to frighten. So – they are told you are a famous powerful person. All over the world people are reading what you write.” (Here a penny dropped!) “And now because of them you are going to write about how wicked Tongos is. Then many people think badly about Tongos. And that makes bad luck. The village has drought, landslides, floods, maybe even an earthquake. Animals die and children have diseases. And for this the bad men will be blamed. For days the village council puts this pressure on the people who are guilty – and the council itself believes what it is saying, or at least half believes it. All these documents are not just bureaucracy. They are like the llama foetuses and parrots’ hearts and so on which witch-doctors use. They help to build up the pressure. Then usually the thief’s nerve goes and he gives up what he stole. For you this is not how the law works and maybe you think when we know who is guilty he should be arrested and go to jail. But if we punish when the village people recover, then we upset the whole system. And it is a good system in the sierra where communities are small enough to use these pressures. The punishment for such men is disgrace for themselves and their families. Most village Indians are honest and hate thieves. For Rodrigo this sort of punishment doesn’t matter. He is already a known criminal and despised. He is a cousin of Aurora and has cheated her father out of many soles and made much family trouble.” (Another penny dropped.) “But he was not the thief. He has bigger ideas. He wanted to blackmail you for having no visa and get a lot of money. But Aurora says you frightened him – I don’t know how. And then afterwards he got more frightened because Aurora said you are so powerful with many government friends in Lima.” Pedro paused and smiled. “Maybe now I should arrest you! But how can you renew a visa in the sierra? You cannot tie your mula to the top of a bus and go to the Immigration Office in Lima!”
On which civilised note we bade each other good-night. I’m looking forward to the morning, when Aurora and Victor join us for a farewell celebratory breakfast. They too will have to sign documents – for reasons unclear – before returning to Tongos.
Camp on Ledge of steep Mountain. 24 November
A few miles beyond Pampas our rough dirt-road left the fertile valley floor and turned left to force its tortuous way through this mighty massif. Today has been one of the most spectacular of the entire trip. A steady 22-mile climb – we now have kilometre stones! – ever round and up, and round again and up again, with new combinations of melodramatic vistas appearing at every corner. “Seeing’s believing”, commented Rachel sagely at one point. She added, “You know, you won’t be able to write properly about all this – it’s not the sort of thing you can describe.” Too true! We were then overlooking a canyon in which the Empire State Building would seem like a garden shed. Later, as we stood above a panorama of heart-lifting splendour we counted eight distinct shades of mountain blue, ranging from navy-blue to the palest powder-blue – depending on the remoteness of the range, its geological nature and botanical garb (if any), the relative position of the sun and the shadows of occasional high white clouds. One never becomes used to the Andes; a sense of wonder suffuses every hour.
This region’s only defect is Alflessness.
Camp on High Puna. 25 November
Today began with one of those brief, perfect experiences which seem detached from the rest of life: flawless memory-jewels, to be cherished forever. Leaving Rachel asleep, I crawled out to dress at 5.15. The dawn world was profoundly still. In a sky of the most delicate blue-green, a pale gold crescent moon shone – brilliant alone but for the morning star, poised steadily luminous above a slim silver cloud that lay along the darkness of the eastern mountains. I sat entranced, motionless. Then the green tinge faded and the blue deepened. Moments later, Venus was extinguished as the cloud glowed rose-pink while violet shadows filled the valley far below. At which point Rachel pulled back the flap and asked, “What are you doing sitting there on the frost looking like a zombie?”
This morning’s olive-green puna was broken by many gullies of raw red earth and stark outcrops of black and silver rock. Our road climbed to within a hundred feet of a dramatic two-pronged peak first seen yesterday, when it seemed a remote, inaccessible summit. Soon after, the sun began to draw dense vapour from the apparently bottomless abyss on our left. The effect of that swift, sinuous upward movement was quite eerie, as though we were being privileged to witness some secret elemental rite. “Imagine,” said Rachel, “we’re seeing clouds being born!” The natural result of seeing clouds being born promptly followed: they enveloped us. Then a gusty wind got up, and through the hesitantly dispersing mist we glimpsed vast nearby chasms and distant snow-streaked ranges.
For two sunny midday hours we sweated hard as the road switchbacked just below a series of rock-peaks. Then it sloped to an abandoned mine where a solitary campesino woman was herding llamas; and from there we could see it soaring ever higher to cross a pass on which a few hovels stood out against the skyline. We are camped on a narrow ledge below that pass, the only possible site for miles around. As the condor flies the pass is scarcely half-a-mile away, as the road winds it is an hour’s walk. Now rain is hammering on the tent so that we can hardly hear ourselves think and water is audibly running below the floor.
Camp by Rio. 26 November
A pewter-grey morning, the stillness broken only by post-deluge water rushing down every slope. When we reached the wretched shamlet on the pass its entire population – about thirty coca-chewing people, ragged and filthy – turned out to view us incredulously. Maize straw was provided as a gift for Juana who embarrassed us by ungraciously refusing it; she approved of the brand of puna grass on offer last night.
For the rest of the day we were only rarely on the carretera. This was a region of contrasting mountains: some smooth and grassy green to their summits, some angular, rocky and barren. Many llamas grazed in long, broad, velvet-turfed valleys and their astonished herds stared at us mutely as we passed.
We walked for eleven hours today and are now camped beside a turbulent young rio only vaguely suggested, and left nameless, on our maps. There is barely room for the tent on a grassy ledge just above the water and surrounded by low scrub and acres of stony riverbed. In theory such sites are verboten, especially at the beginning of a rainy season; but we could find no other level patch for many miles around and it was already dusk when we stopped here.
This long, narrow, twisting valley is Alfless and oatless; only potatoes and Inca vegetables are grown on the precipices above and below the scattered hovels. Juana is again losing condition and we plan to give her a few days rest in Ayacucho if the local Alf supply is adequate.
Mayor Police Station. 27 November
By 7 we were climbing onto the first of a series of bulging mountains overhanging the valley floor. Tremendous greenery-filled chasms separated these mountains and to gain half-a-mile our mud-slippy track had to curve around each chasm for three or four miles. In the keen morning air our bellies felt very empty; last night we ate the last of our Jauja supplies – a small tin of beans and four stale buns between us. After three hours the track dropped again to river-level, before climbing to a shamlet just below a high pass. Here we eagerly sought food, but there was none; most of the campesinos were away in their fields. Then a brief precipitous redura took us down to Churcampa – an enchanting pueblo of helpful people, steep cobbled streets, an unexpectedly imposing Plaza, an eating-house serving chips and omelettes and an ancient woman with only one ear who reluctantly agreed to provide Alf.
From Churcampa’s wide green shelf one overlooks an uncanny landscape, far below. This immensity of arid red earth is crisscrossed with convoluted dry river-beds, and long ridges that would seem mountains almost anywhere else, and what look from a height like mere heat-cracks but are in fact deep fissures littered with jagged hunks of rosy-hued rock. An appropriately melodramatic redura took us down so fast that we could feel the air thickening as though the extra oxygen were a tangible substance. Then for miles our level path wound between clumps of young spear-cactus, their cool blue-green refreshing amidst this desiccated wilderness. The only other vegetation was a low, nasty-smelling dark green bush that not even goats will eat. Soon we were sweat-soaked and we paused often to gulp pints of sun-warmed water. The hot silence created a curiously tense atmosphere. No breeze stirred; no bird or insect flew or called; there was no movement but our own. Occasionally we glanced back in awe at the cordillera from which we had just descended, a blue, flat-topped mountain wall filling the northern sky and rising sheer from this barren ledge. For it was no more than a ledge, as we realised when without warning we were overlooking a turmoil of lesser mountains. Through a gap, we glimpsed the Mantaro canyon far below; seen from such a height, the broad brown river seemed unnaturally immobile and noiseless. Hereabouts it has carved a horseshoe loop through a phalanx of mountain massifs; from where we then stood, it was both in front of us and (though invisible to the east) behind us. To reach the little pueblo of Mayor, on its left bank, we had to descend another two thousand feet on a ladder-steep and perilously narrow path.
Approaching Mayor, today’s weirdness reached its climax as we plunged into a world where Nature has gone mad. For a time we lost the path and went wandering bemusedly through a labyrinth of ravines. All around us the soft cliffs – red, grey, yellow – had been transformed into battlements and turrets and squat towers and soaring spires; a lunatic extravaganza of erosion made to seem even more improbable by many small clumps of a translucent flesh-pink cactus we’ve never seen before, and giant candelbra cacti like green echoes of the rock spires, and thickets of prickly pear, and threatening sword cacti with misshapen stems fantastically contorted into attitudes of pain and protest. Here a powerful feeling of unreality overcame me, as though I were having hallucinations. And Rachel’s reaction was similar. She said: “This can’t be real! I’ve always imagined the moon would look like this!”
Mayor is almost as weird as its hinterland; most of the few inhabitants look a trifle crazed, which is not surprising. At first it seemed a deserted village; we saw nobody while walking down a long street of single-storey adobe houses – all padlocked, though it was then 6.10. Later we learned that there has been mass-migration to Lima. The main Plaza was also lifeless, apart from a haggard, spinning campesino woman squatting at the half-closed door of an empty shop. She scowled at us and said there is no food available because Mayor is too far from everywhere. This however was an exaggeration. Little can be grown in the pueblo’s desert-like surroundings, but a carretera of sorts runs on the far side of the Mantaro and basic supplies come in by truck. Unfortunately these do not include fodder and as Juana had had nothing to eat since 11 a.m. we were frantically worried. Coming to a second, smaller Plaza, we saw an unexpectedly large police station and went to beg for aid and advice. The police, not being native to Mayor, are the most normal people around. A fat, cheerful senior officer invited us to spend the night as guests of the force and despatched a junior officer to requisition Alf from the only local who grows it – on a minute strip of irrigated land near the Mantaro. So I’m writing this sitting on the concrete floor of an empty room with Rachel asleep beside me on her flea-bag because it’s too hot to be in it. Juana is audibly munching in a nearby patio where a life-sized statue of St Rose of Lima, patron saint of the Peruvian police, stands in one corner with a few dusty plastic flowers at its feet. In another corner are two barrels which a small boy fills twice daily with murky Mantaro water for police ablutions and cooking. The Mayor restaurant, where Rachel ate an inferior lomo saltado while I (too heat-exhausted to eat) drank six litres of cerveza, is the filthiest we’ve seen. Even the celebrated Murphy immunities may not preserve us from its after-effects.
Camp in muddy Stubble-field. 28 November
Below Mayor the young but mighty Mantaro swirls loud and swift around the base of a gigantic black cliff jutting out from the opposite mountain. At 6.30 we crossed a new suspension bridge and for the next two hours were in a barren gorge which even at this hour was heat-tormented. Here the erosion mood was pure Gothic; we might have been walking between the ruins of a thousand cathedrals. The fluted pillars were pale grey or brown, boldly streaked with red or pink; and occasionally, at the foot of these cliffs, great oblong symmetrical chunks of rock or clay stood isolated like giants’ altars.
At the confluence of the Mantaro and the Huarpa we turned due south, to ascend the Huarpa valley on a track that takes a trickle of motor traffic from Huancayo via Pampas to Ayacucho. The hills on our left were an astonishing bright pink and orange, a few cane-fields grew by the river, and for miles the track ran between blossoming shrubs and low trees on which lines of berries, like coral necklaces, hung below long, serrated leaves.
At noon we came to an isolated hovel and rejoiced to see CERVEZA scrawled in huge white letters across the gable wall. An emaciated young man with a withered left arm runs this shebeen; he was not quite sober when we arrived – and I wasn’t quite sober when we left. The cerveza supply had run out, but on being informed by Rachel that this is my birthday he provided instead several glasses (I can’t remember exactly how many) of home-distilled cane spirits: not the most energising potation at noon on a very hot day. And Juana was given a large pile of chopped cane stalks which, mercifully, she condescended to eat. This mestizo couple have six small children and we’ve seen no more wretched campesinos in Peru. They grow a little cane and maize, and fish in the river, and sell a few drinks to the occasional passing truck-driver. The twenty-four-year-old wife sounds tubercular when she coughs. Before leaving we distributed our precious half-dozen oranges, bought in Mayor, amongst the children – one of those futile gestures of guilty generosity that afterwards engender a vague shame because of a suspicion that the main motive was to ease one’s own discomfort …
Climbing away from the Huarpa, our track ran between heat-radiating cliffs of soft grey clay and porous rock. When a little van appeared we had had fifteen minutes warning: its noise in that valley seemed an aural crime. It drew up beside us in a cloud of fine dust; the young driver had witnessed our departure from Pampas and was full of sympathy, assuming we couldn’t afford motor-transport. He gave us a kilo of pickled olives, ladled out of a huge wooden cask.
An hour later, from the crest of a high ridge, we saw Huanta – a biggish pueblo – looking deceptively close on the floor of a round fertile valley where Alf grew tall. On our way down we tried hard to buy some but nobody would sell, at any price, and we both sensed anti-gringo vibes. In Huanta – an attractive pueblo, architecturally if not humanly – we paused for rice and mutton stew. But I can never enjoy a meal when Juana has nothing. Soon we were climbing out of the valley between acres of Alf, yet here too nobody would sell. As the light faded we left all crops behind, and all hopes for Juana’s supper. Briefly we considered theft, but couldn’t quite overcome our inhibitions. This site, on the edge of a stony, crudely ploughed stubble-field of sticky clay, offers our mula only sparse grass, growing along a damp ditch between tent and road. Rachel, ever optimistic, gathered fuel by torchlight and I attempted the fire ceremony. But everything wetly resisted a whole box of matches so we’ve had no celebratory hot drink.
Camp on lush Pasture. 29 November
This morning a memorable insect crawled onto my hand off one of the Diana-bags that had been out under the flap all night. Its fat grey-green body was about an inch and a half long, its hairy legs at least three inches long and its slowly waving antennae still longer. Even Rachel, who is abnormally well-disposed towards all God’s creatures, had to admit that it looked exceedingly disagreeable. Many Peruvian insects are of Andean proportions and peculiar aspect; my experience of them is wide as I often uncover specimens on lifting a big stone to hammer the picket.
After a night of non-stop rain, heavy sticky mud clung irritatingly to boots and hoofs as we struck camp. Poor Juana was in an understandably anti-load mood and today has been marred by fodder-worry. For long hot hours we marched around a succession of dusty grey mountains with not a hovel or an animal to be seen. By noon we were on a naked rock-ridge overlooking an immense pallid semi-desert dominated by La Quinua’s monument – a conspicuous pillar commemorating the Battle of Ayacucho. (On 9 December 1824 a mestizo force under Marshal Sucre thrashed the Spanish army and decisively ended Spanish rule in Peru.) Our road could be seen wriggling frenziedly around countless impenetrable ravines on its way across this sun-scourged landscape. And nowhere was there a mouthful of vegetation for our mula.
Beyond the semi-desert we abruptly rejoined the tarred costa-to-selva highway, which gradually descended to river-level (the Huarpa again). Here we were diverted by dense swarms of two-inch crickets enjoying their mating season – hopping and copulating all over the road like an animated carpet. Luckily for them there was little traffic. For three hours we followed the rio through a heavily populated valley where many crops are grown, but no Alf. However, on this site – a little-used soccer pitch on the outskirts of a village – the grass is long and lush.
Camp on steep rocky mountain. 30 November
A day of disappointments. We had planned to spend some time in Ayacucho, exploring the town and its surroundings (both of exceptional interest) while Juana put on flesh. But alas! even with the assistance of a kind university lecturer we could find neither corral nor Alf-merchant. The bigger the town the less easy it is to cater for a mula’s needs.
Ayacucho prides itself on its record of political activity, usually organised by the university students. The university is one of the oldest in the New World, dating from 1677. The town was founded on 9 January 1539, as a military post to protect travellers from the guerrilla bands of Manco Inca, a grandson of Huayna-Capac. And this morning the military were still much in evidence as numerous army jeeps drove through the narrow old streets with arrogant recklessness, their youthful crews brandishing revolvers, rifles and machine-guns.
At 8 a.m. the atmosphere was enjoyably tense in the central Parque Sucre, as though the crowd was awaiting not a student rally but some daring display like parachuting or motor-cycle racing. Citizens of all ages huddled in groups excitedly exchanging conspiratorial whispers. It was rumoured that a bomb had been placed somewhere in the town centre … Then hundreds ofjubilant-looking grey-uniformed children swarmed into the Plaza: all the schools had closed for the day. Many small boys produced balloons from their satchels and inflated them; they had evidently been hoping for a Protest Fiesta.
We tethered Juana outside a restaurant down a side-street with a small sheaf of oats, the only fodder available. As we breakfasted, four tall blonde gringoes came in – the first foreigners we’ve seen since leaving Chavin. They looked like albino giants, so accustomed have we become to the tiny dark campesinos.
By 10 the post office had decided to close for the day; and outside the bank, where we went to cash a cheque, striking clerks were occupying the pavement. They explained that their action had nothing to do with the student rally and apologised profusely for inconveniencing the gringo. I in turn explained that Irish gringoes are used to their own banks going on strike for six or eight months. That fascinated them – as well it might! But we do need cash, so we tried the hotels; all were firmly closed and refused to open. The owners were viewing the scene from first floor balconies and, in reply to my pleas, shouted that to open would be peligroso. At which point I began to wonder if intimidation also happens in Ayacucho.
By noon a Communist Party student leader was fervently addressing a large appreciative crowd in the Parque Sucre and army jeeps were blocking all the adjacent streets. Our university friend then advised us to leave because if shots were fired Juana might bolt. I thought it unlikely that shots would be fired but if we wanted to find grazing it was time to go – most reluctantly, for Ayacucho is the loveliest town we’ve seen since Cajamarca.
At 3.15 disaster struck. Without warning, Juana lay down on the track – carefully, not disturbing the load – and made it plain that she could not go on. Obviously her collapse was genuine; she is not a mulish mule. Rachel promptly burst into tears and I felt likewise but restrained myself. “She’s going to die!” wailed Rachel. “Nonsense!” I snapped. “She’s just got the knocks – you’ve only to look at her to see she’s not ill.” Which was true.
But what next? We were on a narrow path, midway across an almost sheer mountain, with 300-foot cliffs above us and grey slopes below, falling for a few thousand feet to a scrub-filled gorge. About a thousand feet down we could see a curved protuberance, like a beer-drinker’s paunch, on which the gradient eases and a bushy herb, favoured by Juana, grows sparsely. Normally, one would have described that bulge as inaccessible. But necessity is the mother of recklessness. We unloaded Juana, which wasn’t easy as she lay there looking puzzled by her own misfortune. Then patiently – it took some time – we coaxed her to her feet and I led her over the edge. Very gradually we zig-zagged down, toing and froing across that sun-baked skiddy vastness of loose earth over rock. Juana didn’t slip nearly as often as I did; indeed she supported me, and my four subsequent journeys down, carrying instalments of the load, were much more exhausting and nerve-wracking.
From every practical point of view this site is a masochist’s paradise, yet aesthetically it ranks among our Top Ten. The northern horizon is still dominated by that flat-topped cordillera between Pampas and Churcampa – now a hazy blue majesty of mountain, reigning over all those lesser peaks and grey ridges and green valleys that stretch chaotically from its base to our present site high above Ayacucho. Looking back over such a region, to a barrier as mighty as that cordillera, provokes an absurd incredulity at the realisation that one’s own two feet (not to mention one’s daughter’s nine-year-old feet) have carried one up, across, down and over The Lot … While in action this feeling never comes: then one is getting on with the job. But sites like this, which allow a panoramic view, make it impossible to repress a frisson of triumph.
Setting up this camp has been my most gruelling Andean experience, for a variety of reasons – the severe gradient and shifting topsoil, the cruel afternoon heat on a barren rock-mountain, an empty belly (Ayacucho’s bank strike has left us with a major problem) and suppressed anxiety about Juana. I think it’s only the knocks; just now she has been rolling and kicking very happily (if not very prudently) near the edge of our bulge. And she is enjoying the green oats which I spent the late afternoon prising out of a reluctant campesino in a distant valley at the end of the gorge. Yet I’m more worried than I’ve admitted to Rachel. Cuzco is still over 350 tough miles away. Everything will depend on the fodder supply and the omens are hard to read at this season.