FORTY-SIX
Roxana Begs to Differ
Cusco
Should you find yourself in Cusco en route to Machu Picchu, I highly recommend that you stop for a drink at the Cross Keys Pub. Not only is it the best place to get a beer in town, but just inside the second-floor entrance, to the right, are some old scrapbooks that are well worth a look. In one of them is pasted a photograph of a handsome man in his early forties, athletically built, with a gigantic stogie clenched between his teeth. The beverage awaiting him on the bar appears not to be his first of the evening.
“Thought you might enjoy seeing that one, Mark,” the man in the photograph said to me as we flipped through the album.
This was the second interesting set of plastic-covered photos that John Leivers had shown me since meeting me at the airport. Earlier, he’d pulled out a four-by-six laminated card that was illustrated on both sides. On the front was a color snapshot of his cracked-open chest, heart beating within; on the other was a black-and-white line drawing that looked like an electrician’s diagram for rewiring a rather lumpy circuit breaker; little arrows explained just how the triple-bypass worked. In the flesh, John was a little bit thinner than when I’d last seen him. He looked more like Hiram Bingham than ever.
“I think that photo was taken not long after I walked the Inca Trail for the first time. Did I tell you about that? That must have been the first time I did it in bare feet, too.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the Inca Trail covered in rocks?”
“Oh, it’s not too bad if you’ve trained your feet for it. Feels good to have your soles in contact with the earth. All the porters kept complimenting me for being connected to the Pachamama, the Mother Earth.” For the record, John had walked it twice in bare feet and four times in flip-flops. He was planning to wear boots this time.
We strolled down the cobblestones of Triunfo Street, through the Plaza de Armas, where the annual Inti Raymi festivities were in full swing. This celebration, which dates back to the Incas, originally honored the bond between the sun and his son the Inca. It also marked the new year. Every street surrounding the main square was filled with garishly dressed marching bands, girls in traditional costumes and boys wearing ukuku masks, which look like ski masks with clown faces knitted onto them. It was as if the Colorblind Junior Majorette Society of Greater Cusco had scheduled a social mixer with the Future Bank Robbers of Southern Peru.
Our plan was to start the Inca Trail on June 18, arrive at Machu Picchu on the twenty-first, and ride up to the ruins early on the twenty-second to see the sunrise over the sacred peak and, with any luck, the light beam shooting into the Torreon. (The solstice lasts from the twenty-first to the twenty-fourth.) I’d read everything I could find on the subject but hadn’t encountered anything conclusive. John had checked his personal archives and confirmed that while various anecdotal reports testified to something interesting happening at the Torreon on those mornings, digital compass readings indicated the window didn’t align with the same solstice angle—roughly sixty-five degrees—that shot straight through the center of Machu Picchu to the riverside Intihuatana shrine and the corridor at Llactapata. And the Incas, I’d been told repeatedly, simply didn’t make engineering mistakes.
There was one potential hitch in our plan. A group of farmers outside of Cusco, angered by the price of cooking gas, was calling for a paro, or general strike, on the day we were scheduled to leave town. In New York, the word “strike” conjures up a picture of people with picket signs parading in front of an office building, slightly inconveniencing any smokers who stepped outside to light up. If things get serious, the strikers might bring along a giant inflatable rat to express their displeasure with nonunion laborers. Evidently the word has a somewhat stronger meaning in Peru. All roads inside and outside of Cusco were blockaded by farmers, who rolled rocks into every throughway wider than a mule path and then sat sentry over those barricades, fortifying their political convictions by drinking heavily all day. Schools were closed during general strikes. All trains, including those to Machu Picchu, were canceled. Attempts to sneak through a checkpoint were generally frowned upon. “You really don’t want to drive through one of these blockades,” John told me over a vegetarian lunch. “Every time there’s a strike, you see pictures in the next day’s newspaper of cars and buses burning.”
One of the most famous strikes in Cusco had taken place in 1999, in reaction to a government plan to build a cable car to Machu Picchu. Theoretically, the number of persons admitted to the site each day is limited to twenty-five hundred, though I’ve never heard of anyone being turned away. The planned funicular would have allowed as many as five thousand daily visitors. Several years ago, UNESCO recommended that to limit damage, no more than seventeen hundred sightseers should be allowed at Machu Picchu each day. The number of annual visitors had doubled in the last decade, from about four hundred thousand to more than eight hundred thousand, though entry tickets had more than quadrupled in price during that time.
The 1999 strikes were successful, in part because local protesters were able to frame the proposed construction as a violation of their cultural and religious heritage. The strikes did not, however, halt the stream of crazy ideas to maximize traffic to the site. One recent proposal suggested installing an elevator that would convey passengers up sixteen hundred feet to Machu Picchu’s central plaza. Another recommended placing a dome over the citadel, around which would be constructed a catwalk from which tour groups could look down onto the Intihuatana and the Sacred Plaza as if watching the trained seals jump through hoops at an aquarium.
Such plans are based on the assumption that in the future the government of Peru will still own Machu Picchu. At least one person in Cusco was working hard to challenge that assumption. As it turned out, Yale was not the only party suing Peru over Machu Picchu.
Roxana Abril was a curator at Cusco’s Museo Inka. We met at the fountain in the Plaza de Armas, cut through the revelers and took seats at a second-floor café. It was an arctic day by Cusco standards, about sixty degrees, and after Roxana unwrapped herself from a thick red wool coat, I asked her to explain why, exactly, she was the rightful owner of Machu Picchu.
“Okay, let’s start at the beginning,” she said, and gave me a sad halfsmile, as if to say she’d told this story before and didn’t always get the response she hoped for.
According to Roxana, her great-grandfather started buying up properties on the left side of the Urubamba River, where Machu Picchu sits, in the years before Bingham arrived. He eventually accumulated a parcel that included all of Machu Picchu and much of the Inca Trail. Bingham struck a deal to give the landowner one third of any treasures that he found on his property. Since Machu Picchu had long since been picked over by grave robbers—and Bingham snuck out his teammates’ few valuable finds—Roxana’s great-grandfather wound up with nothing from the dig. After Bingham left, interest in Machu Picchu subsided and the site became overgrown again, an attraction only to huaqueros who almost surely went home empty-handed.
“In 1928, my grandfather, Emilio Abril, said that it was too hard for private people to take care of archaeological properties,” Roxana told me. “The owners of the land cannot prevent the huaqueros. So he offered to sell Machu Picchu to the government of Peru. In 1935, they gave an answer—‘Okay, we’ll buy it.’”
“Wait, they took seven years to respond?” I asked. “Why?”
“Mark, here in Peru things take a very long time.”
Should Roxana ever write her autobiography, that would make an excellent title. Her grandfather gave the chunk of land on which Machu Picchu sat to the state, and over the coming decades, her family continued to farm its property around the ruins, which were still relatively obscure. Roxana remembered walking parts of the Inca Trail as a girl and visiting its various sites. In the 1940s, her grandfather sold off much of his remaining land. (The family that purchased the Abril land is now also claiming title to Machu Picchu. It gets a little complicated.) According to Roxana, all her family ever received from the government in return for what became one of the most valuable pieces of land in South America were some worthless bonds. One of Roxana’s most vivid memories from her girlhood is of her father and brothers going to Lima to ask for the money they felt they were owed. “They never got an answer!” Roxana dug her phone out of her purse and dialed a number. “You should talk to my lawyer,” she said, cupping the mouthpiece. “I have a very good lawyer. He says that half of the pieces at Yale belong to my family because we had not sold the property when Bingham came. Alo?” We sat staring at each other across the table for a minute while she listened to someone on the other end.
“His secretary says he’s out of the country on business.”
“When did you start your legal proceedings?” I asked.
“I sent my first letter in 2003.”
“And what did they say?”
“I’m still waiting to hear back.”
“What sorts of damages are you asking for?”
“I want to ask for one hundred million dollars. The price of three years of entry fees at Machu Picchu.”
“What would you do if the government said, “Okay, Roxana, you win. We’re going to give Machu Picchu back to you.”
“Well, I would stop letting in so many tourists. And I’d get rid of that highway for the bus.” This was the Hiram Bingham Highway, the zigzagging road up the eastern face of the ridge. Roxana folded her arms across her chest. “If people want to visit, let them go by foot like the Incas used to.”