To arrive at Lima airport is to realise instantly that Peru is a nation that cares little about how others perceive it. In other cities governments accept that the airport and its immediate environment are a nation’s first statement. In South America, in particular, it is the status symbol, the image on which a regime and a system stand to be judged. It is at the airport, not at ports and mountain borders, that foreign dignitaries and businessmen arrive, where attitudes matter. In Buenos Aires, the junta had buried the ‘disappeared’ in the forest near the international airport before sowing the area with grass. They then built a motorway all the way to the centre of town. But in Lima no one had bothered.
Beyond passport control men with shifty faces waited, offering taxis in the manner of those who offer whores. There were policemen fingering sub-machine-guns. There seemed to be a high risk of being caught in a cataclysmic crossfire, and arriving passengers instinctively clustered in groups.
‘Want to share a taxi to town? It’ll be more reliable,’ one tourist said.
‘Do you know of a good hotel?’ asked another.
‘This airport gives me the creeps,’ said a third.
Beyond the airport was a shanty town. Others I had seen in South America had a temporary, transient look about them. You felt that the sheet iron and makeshift latrines could be taken down just as easily as they had been put up. But this one seemed to have been around for many years. It rarely rains in Lima, so the squat, square blocks of sandy earth used as homes had been moulded into the dust and had given the periphery the aspect of a desert town.
‘What happens when it rains?’ I asked.
‘Oh, it’s very rare,’ said Pedro, ‘but if it rains, the huts melt like candles.’ Pedro weighed at least sixteen stone, must have been in his mid-fifties, and had the dark yellowish features of his Indian ancestors. He was the only person I had remotely trusted at the airport. Whereas everyone else had shouted and hassled, he had gone on sitting on a crate of Coca-Cola. He was reading a newspaper and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette and seemed oblivious to the time of day or the nature of the airport’s latest arrivals.
When we first approached him, he had asked us to leave him alone as he was having his afternoon break. ‘But you won’t have trouble getting a lift from one of those sharks,’ he had said before burying himself in the sports page. We pestered him, begging deliverance from the sea of sharks, and he agreed under certain conditions.
‘If you come with Pedro, you have to accept that it’s Bartolomé taking us and that Bartolomé likes taking his time. He is reliable and good and my best friend but he’s not a shark, he’s a tortoise.’ I looked around for his companion. I imagined an old man, perhaps a cripple. But there was no one, not even a dog hiding behind the crate. Pedro noted our perplexity and with a huge grin slapped the bonnet of his taxi.
‘Bartolomé saved us from extinction and he still does today.’
The vehicle had been named after Father Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican friar who in the sixteenth century devoted a lifetime to the work of securing fair treatment for the Indians after the Spanish conquest. Las Casas had conducted a major public debate before the Imperial Court, arguing that the Indians, being subjects of the Spanish Crown, should enjoy equal rights with the Spaniards and that the colonists should support themselves by their own efforts and that they had no right to enforced labour.
Las Casas aroused intense opposition from those with a vested interest in the supply of native labour and from theologians as convinced of the righteousness of their cause. The chief of these was Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who argued that the Aristotelian doctrine of natural slavery was entirely applicable to the Indians on the grounds of their ‘natural inferiority’. The debate proved inconclusive. As the centuries passed, the Indians’ descendants were allowed only a token advance on the social scale – from slaves to second-class citizens.
Pedro took us very slowly towards the city. The air smelt of diesel mixed with urine. It was heavily polluted and seemed to have had all moisture sucked from it. There was a hectic, chaotic movement of people. They clung to overcrowded buses, jumped traffic lights, collided with each other on the broken pavements. The dust swirled and framed the situation in a yellowish haze. The crowds were made up of half-castes and Indians, scarcely a white among them.
We left the mud huts behind, manoeuvring our way through streets where past and present co-existed in an architectural free-for-all. There was no immediately clear definition here as in Quito, but a more disordered grafting of graceless modern blocks on to the ribs of decayed palaces. Pedro left us at a hotel that seemed to have been expropriated in some distant revolution. It had been one of the city’s luxury additions once, complete with phones, televisions and room service. But none of its services functioned any more. Instead an ageing bell porter accompanied us to a room no one had bothered to clean, where the sheets used by the previous occupant lay crumpled on the edge of a bed.
The tourist map suggested a walk through the shopping streets of Lima to the Plaza de Armas, where the city had managed to retain a semblance of architectural purpose. Here were to be found the remnants of the City of the Kings founded by the conquistador Francisco Pizarro in 1535 in all its imperial and post-colonial splendour – cathedral, government palace, and Archbishop’s residence gathered round a seventeenth-century bronze fountain.
The Spaniards had marked out Lima in straight lines and forty-five degree angles, and yet the chaos I had witnessed on the outskirts became more concentrated the nearer we came to the centre. The people had abandoned geometry; they surged this way and that, ran, crowded into shops. There was a scarcely hidden aggression in the antics of the street vendors. As you passed, they thrust everything at you from a mangled puppy to a piece of reproduction Inca silver. A clown played a record on an old gramophone and then smashed it against the nearest pillar. An urchin kicked another urchin in the mouth. Near them a dwarf without arms or legs spun his trunk on a wooden board, and uttered a demented squeal. The atmosphere of simmering violence was reflected in the newspaper headlines: ‘BARRACKS ATTACKED’, ‘CHILD HELD FOR RANSOM’, ‘DELINQUENT ATTACKS BANK’, ‘CHILDREN BURNT TO DEATH,’ they declared. Each story was as grizzly as the next. Peruvians seemed to have nothing else to read about except football.
In the Plaza de Armas there were many more policemen than civilians. A smallish crowd of tourists had gathered outside the presidential palace to watch the guard in their white uniforms and plumes as they slow-marched across a courtyard. Japanese clicked obsessively with their cameras unaware that an eerie silence seemed to have descended over the city. At each entrance to the Plaza, detachments of riot police stood in awkward formation. Short muskets tipped with gas canisters protruded from their grey uniforms. Then an officer with a whip walked over to us and told us to leave the Plaza.
‘We are tourists,’ I said.
‘Well, tourism is cancelled today,’ the officer said. Across the square, two police trucks with water cannon had taken up positions near the bronze statue as if to underline the point. We decided it was best to leave.
As we walked back to the hotel, we passed groups of students setting fire to parts of the city — a car here, a newspaper stand there. Sometimes they lobbed their Molotov cocktails at nothing in particular and left them simmering on the empty pavement. There were some students who shouted slogans for university reform and cheaper bus fares as they waved red flags or hid behind handkerchiefs. Others seemed simply to chase their own shadows along the wall, like effete ballet dancers. On one street corner they had captured a policeman and were subjecting him to an impromptu ‘people’s trial’. This consisted in having him pose dejected and humiliated between two student ‘guards’ as a group of photographers snapped the scene for posterity. Then the gas filtered through the streets and the shots rang out beyond the Plaza and we ran the rest of the way to the hotel.
Through most of the night there was the sound of distant detonations and occasional gunfire, and then around three o’clock in the morning someone blew up an electricity pylon and our hotel and most of the surrounding area was plunged into darkness. ‘It’s the Shining Path,’ someone whispered in the corridor.
It was in 1980 that Shining Path had first announced its existence by hanging dogs from telephone wires in Lima and burning ballot boxes in the southern town of Ayacucho. The organisation’s founder was Abimael Guzmán, a philosophy student and dissident of the Peruvian Communist Party who, with messianic zeal, pursued his vision of a ‘fourth sword of Marxism’, in the wake of Marx, Lenin and Mao. Guzmán claimed Marxism-Leninism had lost its ‘purity’ in the ‘revisionism’ of Moscow and Peking and that there was a need to eradicate old structures and set up a popular republic. Guzmán’s ‘Shining Path’ organisation took its name from the political theories of José Carlos Mariátegui, another Peruvian Marxist, who had predicted that pure Marxism – Leninism would open the ‘shining path to revolution’.
From its earliest action, Sendero Luminoso had spread its field of operations gradually, recruiting among the peasants in the south of Peru through a mixture of ideological persuasion and terrorism. By the time we arrived in Peru Sendero guerrillas had earned a reputation as South America’s Khmer Rouge – fanatical, cruel and ruthless in their killings and torture of political opponents. In the south their influence was taken so seriously that thirteen provinces were under military control.
The morning after the explosion, we met Pedro again. I asked him what he thought about Sendero Luminoso.
‘It’s the biggest problem we have here. They are pushing this country into chaos and the government doesn’t know what to do with them. In South America we have always been used to guerrillas that are here one day and gone the next – a bit of revolution then a military coup and it’s all over. But Sendero is different. It goes on and on, and no one wins, so the country is in a permanent state of unresolved violence,’ Pedro said.
‘Have they the support of the people?’ I asked.
‘Perhaps, but you have to understand there is a lot of fear, many people disappear, no one knows what happens to them or who’s responsible. Some say it’s Sendero, but others say it’s the army. It’s a war without rules.’
‘Disappeared.’ It was a word that before coming to South America I had identified with fairy tales. Subsequently it came to be redefined as part of a gruesome lie. It was a category the Argentine military had first invented to excuse the kidnapping, torture and murder of thousands of political opponents. To say someone had died was to admit responsibility, but to describe someone as ‘disappeared’ was to cast doubt over existence itself. To the relatives of the victims it was the cruellest of methods, where nothing was certain, not even the manner of death.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Pedro said. His cigarette was even bigger than the one I had seen him light that first time at the airport. It rested on the dashboard, smouldering. ‘You think this is something peculiar to this crazy age we live in, the age of failed democracies and sophisticated military coups. But you forget history goes back further than yesterday.’
And so it was that on the morning after the student riots Pedro drove us to the place where the Court of the Inquisition had presided in the seventeenth century. There, a woman in white socks and a neat blue suit sold us a ticket. I marvelled at the ceiling. It was intricately carved in mahogany.
‘The torture chamber is down those steps to the left,’ the woman said. Her tone was clipped, not so much bossy as irritable. Boredom had long since undermined the challenge of authority.
I went on looking at the ceiling.
‘The torture chamber …’ she began again. She offered us a guidebook in English. ‘It tells you all you need to know. All the artefacts and protagonists are carefully listed and there are photographs …’ she said, brushing imaginary specks of dust from her ticket box.
‘I’m Spanish,’ I said, ‘like the Holy Inquisition.’ Pedro then nudged me from behind and we walked on down the steps.
In the basement there was a smell of chewing gum and wax. The excited cackle of a group of Peruvian schoolgirls reverberated around the stone walls. A Japanese in a short-sleeved white shirt pushed and shoved his way through, before photographing a tableau of a model heretic being garrotted. The names of the one hundred Indians who had been stretched, broken and finally burnt for not confessing to the faith had been inscribed in gold on wooden plaques. Lest we forget …
‘Heroes or victims?’ I asked Pedro.
‘Both, perhaps. We open this to the public as if to say: “Look, this is what Peru used to be under the terrible Spanish rule. This is the Peru we overcame.” We can only show a museum and not the reality because we are civilised today. But we all know that more people have been killed by Sendero and the military than by the Inquisition.’
‘So why did you bring us here?’
‘To show you what we are and what we are not,’ said Pedro. He had taken out a penknife and was scraping a plaque where one of the schoolgirls had stuck her gum.
We crossed one of the few remaining historical landmarks of the city – the seventeenth-century Roman-style bridge with grey slabs of stone legend insisted had been bound together with thousands of egg whites. Earthquakes through the ages had shaken Lima to its foundations, but the bridge over the River Rimac had remained constant in the midst of an ever-changing landscape of crumbling houses and emerging tower blocks. On one side of the bridge were the impeccable presidential guard, performing their daily goose-step ritual as if yesterday’s riot had never happened. On the other, gathered down secret rubbish-filled alleyways, were the washerwomen, bent double over stone fonts, whispering as they wrung away the city’s dirt. Their hands were as rough as reptile skin and they had thick, strong arms. One woman was probably no more than thirty but she looked much older. Quite soon into our conversation, she showed us her foot, smudged with varicose veins and a poorly healed gash. ‘Once I was working out in the field with the children and I stepped on a piece of split cane. A splinter went through my foot as easily as a sharp knife cuts through a cooked potato. The nearest village was two miles away, so I walked for two miles. There were no doctors, but they took the splinter out and gave me salt. Washing, you see, keeps you out of harm’s way,’ she said. As she went on scrubbing, the water splashed on to the dusty ground, causing foam-tipped rivulets of muddy water to slide back down the alleyway to where the River Rimac moved like an insidious snake.
We walked on to the church of Santo Domingo, where I had heard poor Peruvians sought solace with one of the world’s few black saints. In South America, being black is inferior even to being Indian, so since his death in 1639 San Martín de Porres, a black friar who had achieved sainthood by having no other ambition than to sweep floors with a broomstick, had engrained himself in the popular consciousness as a form of reassurance. The graffiti scribbled near the place where his bones once lay, were mostly pledges of conversion. ‘Help us be good’ said one. ‘Please let me grow up to be a poet,’ said another. There were phrases that smacked of suffering and a peculiarly Indian stoicism. For instance, ‘I have lost my first six children. Help me to keep my seventh.’ I would have been happy to leave the kind, selfless San Martín just with these scattered personal confessions. And yet someone had felt the necessity to write in wider, more blackened lettering than all the others, the only testimony to Peru past and present: ‘Viva Sendero Luminoso.’
Miraflores, Lima’s residential area, straddles, like an outer planet, the Pacific coast. A long avenue leads you away from the bustle and the smells and the squat mud houses without roofs into an atmosphere scented with flowers and spotted with colour. We passed by the American Embassy, surrounded by walls and presided over by marines with shaven heads, into suburbs littered with the remnants of more glorious times. There were houses with white towers where the plaster had cracked and formed dark tributaries; wooden lodges leaning on stilts like the homes of some forgotten witch’s tale. Across the doorways, elaborate crests of arms echoed the decadence of a nobility overtaken by history. I had been told that in the homes once lived in by Spanish aristocrats there were now bankers and Generals and Russian diplomats. On the outer walls of their homes, dark splodges of graffiti screamed defiance, resurrecting the spirits of old Inca rebellions and more recent aggressions. In the middle of Miraflores we stopped near a small park surrounded by a high fence. As we walked towards it, we were overtaken by two young urchins. They jumped on to the fence, and clung there, gaping at the park beyond.
‘Just look at those tits,’ said one.
‘I shit on her tits, it’s the ass that counts,’ said the other. The subject of their gaze were two Indian nannies who were sitting near a flowerbed surrounded by a group of blond children. The children were building palaces with their bricks and eating ice-cream and their locks glittered in the sun like wheat at harvest time. One of the nannies giggled nervously. But her colleague spat at the ground. ‘Go away or I’ll call the police,’ she screamed at the urchins. These nannies were on the other side of the fence once. But now they were surrogate mothers to the immaculate children of the rich.
‘In the whole of old Peru,’ wrote the sixteenth-century mestizo chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘there is undoubtedly no place as revered as the imperial city of Cuzco, which is where all the Inca Kings hold court and establish the seat of government.’
It was difficult to think of Cuzco on the plane that took us towards it, away from the Pacific shoreline and along the Andean cordillera which runs south-east from Lima. The passenger nearest to us was a teacher in her mid-twenties called Ana.
‘Tourism. The more of it we have the better, because without it we’re lost, really lost. I used to be a student once and did what all students do. Read Marx and throw Molotovs, but then I woke up one day and realised that everyone was the same – students, priests, politicians, Generals, they were all part of the same mess that is Peru. The only way we can save ourselves is by getting foreigners to pay for our economic recovery.’
I asked Ana who and what she taught.
‘I teach Peruvians how to speak English. It’s a good imperialist language,’ she said.
Down the corridor, an air steward was announcing that the cabin staff were about to begin a game of Bingo. Our score cards, he told us, were clipped to the emergency instructions pamphlet. Soon he was picking out the numbers from a black hat and enunciating them in jingles. ‘Clickety-click … sixty-six … my oh my … forty-nine …’ His voice seemed strangely disembodied like that of a ventriloquist.
The plane was hit by turbulence and out of the window I could see the sides of the mountains, looming like monsters from a stormy sea.
Ana gripped her seat. ‘Do you think we are going to crash?’
I began to tell her not to worry as Peruvian pilots were used to this sort of weather. Then the cabin staff, as suddenly as they had started, stopped the Bingo game. There was a collective gasp and a single voice that rose above the others protesting that he only had one number left to complete the card.
This is the way the world ends, I thought, not with a bang, but with a whimper of bingo players – no final words, just numbers. Ana was now perspiring heavily and reciting the Hail Mary. But she worried unnecessarily. Within minutes the plane jerked once more, lurched sharply to one side, righted itself and descended rapidly between the mountain tops, through the valley that leads to the Imperial City.
‘When two Indians meet on a road leading to the city, the one who is going there immediately greets the one coming from there as his superior …’ wrote Garcilaso de la Vega.
No one was greeting anybody at Cuzco airport that morning when finally we landed. Because of an earlier storm, outgoing and incoming flights had been delayed, so we were confronted by groups of tired-looking tourists. The first Indian I saw was being shouted at by an American in a panama hat.
‘Do you realise what you’ve done? You’ve gonna got the wrong suitcase and left mine back at the hotel. Now I’m going to miss my damn plane because of you.’
The Indian bowed his head, and shook it from side to side. ‘Me no work hotel, me work airport, very sorry,’ he said. He was holding the two mistaken suitcases and shaking with the strain of their weight.
‘You’re saying you don’t work at the hotel and it’s not your fault? Well I’ll tell ya somethin. Bullshit,’ said the man in the panama hat. He was about to take a swipe at the Indian, but changed his mind and walked off.
Once the American had left, the Indian dropped the suitcase to the ground. As it fell, it opened and spilled its contents of books and clothes on to the pavement. The Indian spat on them and walked away.
Cuzco at a distance seemed a city that was perfectly contained and unified. The town was neatly defined with its lines of tiled roofs and stone walls and whitewash as if a part of Castilian Spain had been transported and set here in Cuzco – the ‘navel of the earth’. On glimpsing it for the first time, Pizarro had also been reminded of his own country, but he was to write later that Cuzco was of such fine quality as ‘would be remarkable even in Spain’. The nearer we walked to the city centre, the more impressive the town became. The houses had massive wooden doors and ornately carved balconies and stood on the foundation stones earlier laid by the Incas. The thick blocks lay fitted tightly together in complex polygonal patterns, their joints so precise they seemed moulded together with putty. Through the centuries, other buildings in Cuzco had collapsed during earthquakes, other walls had cracked beneath the rain and the sun, but these thick stones had survived as a lasting testimony to the Incas’ skill as masons. However narrow the street, however poor the quarter, these stones had endured.
The early history of Cuzco has been confused by legend. It was the young Garcilaso de la Vega, at the age of sixteen, who had first expressed his bafflement when confronted with so much uncertainty. Going up to one of the Inca elders, he had said, ‘The Spanish and the nations that are their neighbours possess books, they know their entire history, and can even say how many thousands of years ago God created heaven and earth. But you have none, how are you able to tell us of your past?’
Mythology sustained the Inca in his early conquests and domination of local tribes. According to oral tradition it was the demigod Manco Cápac who emerged from a cave called Tambo-toco at Pararitacambo, near to the present site of Cuzco, before founding the Imperial City in the fertile valley with a golden hand plough sometime between the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
Manco Cápac’s great-grandchildren were born with a full set of teeth. At the age of one they were as big as an average eight year old, and at two they were already fit for battle. But it was Parachuti, a later descendant, who is credited with the civic planning of Cuzco and the erection of many of its most important buildings in the early fourteenth century, such as the Temples of the Sun, Moon, and Stars, and the Palace of the Serpents, the architectural remains of which are visible today. The expansion of the Inca Empire – which the imperial city of Cuzco reflected – was certainly dramatic. In a period of little more than fifty years, Parachuti and his son Topa Inca extended their domination for almost three thousand miles along the Andes, from central Chile to what is today Colombia. Cuzco became the spiritual and administrative centre of the Empire, South America’s equivalent of Byzantium. Within the city were built the residences of the Inca Kings, their pantheons, courts and holy images.
And yet the Empire, for all its myths and glories, was based on totalitarian deviousness. The Incas claimed solar descent for their royal families. Manco Cápac used a suit of shining armour to reflect the sun’s rays and deceive the people. Subsequently a golden disc was placed in the Temple of the Sun for the same end. When the Spaniards came, they melted down the gold and shattered the illusion.
As we roamed through Cuzco, I reflected on the ornaments and palaces, the fine food and clothing, and the grandiose rituals that had once been a part of life, and contrasted them with the Inca descendants who now shuffled here, crouched there, begged and murmured, resigned to the latest foreign invasion. In the Plaza de Armas, the Incas had once conducted their most elaborate of ceremonies. But the square we saw was deserted except for an Indian woman standing upright next to a black llama. Her plaited black hair fell on to her shoulders from beneath a brown woollen hat and a pair of sandalled feet stood flat-footed under a fading pink skirt.
‘You want a photograph, you pay ten dollars,’ she said pushing the llama in front of me. I settled for two dollars and snapped her picture. Then it began to rain and we ran into the cathedral for cover. The building had been built in the seventeenth century on the site of a ruined Inca palace. Its exaggerated style reflected the extent to which the Spaniards had aped the grandeur of the vanquished. The high altar was solid silver backed with carved mahogany. The sacristy was filled with priceless chalices and gold-encrusted vestments. In a dimly lit chapel, a group of old Indian women were chanting monotonously in Quechua, the Incas’ language, to the accompaniment of a violin played by an old man in a black poncho. Before the group, a broken Christ-on-the-cross figure had turned black from the heat of so much candle flame. In the half-light, the women and the violinist melted in each other’s shadows, while their chanting rose to a wail and echoed through the cathedral.
On our way out, we passed two works of art which seemed to encapsulate the cultural tension which had survived in Cuzco. The first was a painting dating from the late colonial period. It depicted a scene from the Last Supper with eleven white apostles and an Indian Judas. The other was the wooden choir loft. Much of it was carved with angels and saints rising towards heaven, but in the confusion of images a lone Indian artisan had managed to slip in a serpent and a piece of corn as a lasting witness to the world of spirits and superstition shared by the common people. It was a reminder that whereas the official Inca religion, with its deceptions, had quickly been supplanted by Christianity, a more basic idolatry of sorcerers and talismans had survived.
It was no longer raining when we left the cathedral, but the town seemed to be awash with running streams. The brownish water cascaded down the steps and along the narrow streets, oozed from between the narrow crevices of the grey stone blocks, dripped like oil from the doors and niches. Where the Indian woman and the llama had been, another woman was washing some clothes in a huge puddle. Near her stood a pair of soldiers clutching sub-machine-guns under plastic capes. One of them took his gun out and poked the clothes that were piled beside the woman, while the other questioned her in Quechua. When they had finished with her, she gathered her clothes and, nodding her head, walked into the cathedral. Next, across the square came a group of tourists led by a guide who held an umbrella up to the sky like a standard. The tourists were all dressed in identical black raincoats and walked behind their guide in tight formation as if they had been militarised. I asked one of the soldiers if tourists in Cuzco always marched rather than walked.
‘It’s safer that way,’ the soldier answered curtly.
Soon the square was ringed with pairs of soldiers as it filled with tourists and Indians with llamas, and the main crowd converged on the church of La Compañía de Jesús to celebrate the Day of the Epiphany. Garcilaso de la Vega had written:
Such a vast number of people assembled every day that they could only crowd into the square with great difficulty. Manco had all the dead ancestors brought to the festivities. After he had gone with a great entourage to the temple to make an oration to the sun, throughout the morning he proceeded in rotation to the tombs where each dead Inca was embalmed. They were then removed with great veneration and reverence, and brought into the city seated on their thrones in order of precedence. There was a litter for each one, with men in its livery to carry it. The natives came down in this way, singing many ballads and giving thanks to the sun.
Down from the mountain came the Three Kings. Their images stood effetely atop a small platform in the shape of small dolls dressed in crimson silk and broad hats. They were carried on the shoulders of Indians in their shirtsleeves. The carriers swayed at odd angles, as if drunk, laughed and cursed and tripped over their own feet, while behind them a brass band played a military march and small boys let off fireworks.
We followed the procession into the old, dark Jesuit church, where the Palace of the Serpents had once been. It was already filled with Indian women. Many of them had part of their huge skirts draped over the bench in front of them; there were also many children eating whatever their mothers produced from their pockets. On entering the church the band had fallen silent. But now it started up again in a quick military march so that the church was soon filled with the sound of battles and the smell of alcohol. They’re all drunk,’ said an old woman with long grey hair, as she crunched up a banana peel and threw it on to the floor.
There were so many people, and both men and women were such heavy drinkers, and they poured so much into their skins – for their entire activity was drinking, not eating – that it is a fact that two wide drains over half a foot in diameter which emptied into the river beneath the flagstones … ran with urine throughout the day from those who urinated into them, as abundantly as a flowing spring. This was not remarkable when one considers the amount they were drinking and the numbers drinking. But the sight was a marvel and something never seen before.
That night in the hotel, a local tourist guide told us about eight Peruvian journalists who had been found in a remote mountain village near to Cuzco hacked to pieces after setting off to investigate the latest Sendero offensive. It was a story I had already read about in the Argentine newspapers but which recounted locally seemed all the more disquieting. The official government explanation of their deaths was that they had been murdered by terrorists. But the official version had overlooked or simply chosen to ignore the evidence provided by a number of key witnesses who insisted that the journalists had been butchered by peasants acting under military orders.
The guide was anxious to talk, but there was something in the way he volunteered his information that made me mistrust him. So I abandoned the conversation and we went for a pre-bed stroll through the town. Cuzco was bathed in moonlight and a cold breeze swept through the streets. They were empty except for the odd military patrol here and there and the occasional tourist. Once I heard a single gun shot far off followed by the sound of dogs barking, but then the streets were hung in silence again. Walking through the squares of Cuzco and its Inca ruins, the memory of the murdered journalists seemed to touch the city with a deep-rooted sadness. For these buildings had witnessed far worse butcheries in the course of the centuries. They had begun with the sacrifices to the sun, continued with the torture and executions of the defeated Incas, and found their contemporary expression in the unresolved power struggle between Sendero and the military. The murder of the journalists might have shocked the outside world, but in Peru it was interpreted as something akin to a ritual. The methods used against them were no more brutal than those the Spaniards had used against Túpac Amaru. In 1781, near to the place where we were walking that night, the direct descendant of the Inca Emperors had had his tongue cut off and his arms and legs pulled from his body by four horses, before being finally beheaded. Then his severed limbs were carved into several bits and distributed among the neighbouring villages, and his torso was burnt and thrown into the River Watanay.
The next day we caught the train to Machu Picchu. Engine ‘485’, snub-nosed and painted bright orange with red stripes, pulled us in a broad arc above Cuzco. As the train hissed and grated its way up into the hills, small children emerged from crude huts covered in rough thatch. They rubbed the dirt into their faces, and ruffled their hair. One of them yawned while urinating against the side of the hut. Another picked up some stones and threw them at the train. Behind them a group of suckling pigs shuffled forward before digging their snouts into a pile of loose garbage. Most of the huts had clothes hanging from them, but one or two had dried bits of llama meat and strange talismans.
My fellow passengers were talking to each other about the photographs they’d taken the day before, about the relative merits of this hotel and that, where to buy the best ponchos in Ecuador, or blankets in Peru, and how the thinness of the Andean air made them feel sick.
Soon ‘485’ was picking up speed along the great plain of Anta, the setting for the epic fifteenth-century battle between the Incas and the neighbouring Chanca tribe, the outcome of which launched the former on a course of ruthless imperialist expansion. Across the marshy lands, wild horses broke into flight at the noise of the train and hunch-backed cows huddled together nervously. Here and there groups of peasants carrying bundles of corn followed the railway line. Miraculously some of them seemed to have caught up with us when our train suddenly stopped a few miles further along. They were waiting with their corn cobs freshly grilled over open fires. We ate one each and shared a bottle of chicha with one of the railway staff. He said the drink was the purest on earth as it had been made from maize and fermented thanks to the saliva of his girlfriend. It tasted like stale cider and had the same lulling effect on both Kidge and me.
The Indian who had sold us our meal, moved down the train with his remaining corn laid out in a broad basket covered with a yellowish piece of cloth.
Take those away, I don’t want to be poisoned,’ said a Chilean tourist. The Indian moved on silently.
‘The Indians say this is the sacred corn. If someone were to die from it, the world would end,’ said her husband.
‘Nonsense,’ the woman said. And then she bought herself a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate from the train’s bar.
North of Anta, the hills were greener and were sprinkled with tufts of wild yellow flowers. The train filled with the scent of herbs. The hills were lined with the jagged stones of the Inca terraces. Although some of them had been restored, there seemed to be little agricultural activity on the steep slopes. Instead the occasional peasant used the linked passageways and drainage channels as a safe pathway between villages. It was along here too that the great American explorer Hiram Bingham had trekked in 1909 after setting out from Cuzco on his journey of discovery to Machu Picchu. As we left the barren landscape behind us and penetrated the tropical vegetation that clings to the middle reaches of the Andes, I began to share his wonder at the sheer beauty of the region. The rapids of the Urubamba river twisted their way through the canyon, teasingly tossing stones up in the air and spraying the windows of the train. ‘485’ screeched like a demented bird and its sound echoed through the mountains. These rose sheer into the sky, their gigantic precipices encrusted with rocks or streaked with cascades, piled upon one another just as Bingham had seen them.
‘It was the majestic grandeur of the Canadian Rockies, as well as the startling beauty of the Nuuanu Pali near Honolulu, and the enchanting vistas of the Koolau Ditch on Maui. In the variety of its charms and the power of its spell, I know of no place in the world which can compare with it.’
‘485’ stopped where the ground levelled and the river widened and where the undergrowth had crept down from the mountainside and encroached upon the railway line. So great was the sound of rushing water that to step off the train was to feel yourself placed momentarily beneath a waterfall. By now the day was fading and the vegetation was dripping with humidity. A thin mist had begun to shroud the mountains. A bus took us the rest of the way to the heights of Machu Picchu, winding its way towards the higher peaks. For the first time since leaving Cuzco, the tourists had fallen silent, half awestruck, half terrified by the sheer drop on either side of the road and the mass of vegetation that spread out across the valley, which was covered in wild orchids and lupins. When we reached the top the silence broke, as the tourists tumbled out and raced towards the ruins. By then we had decided to wait until the bus had taken them down the hill again so we could see Machu Picchu by ourselves.
The next day we watched the dawn break over Machu Picchu. The sun’s rays moved slowly across the gigantic mountains of granite. Against a black backdrop, first one peak then another became illuminated, the upper reaches cut off from the rest by a collar of pinkish mist. Like a piece of creation, Machu Picchu was revealed to us in slow motion, the light spreading as it fell down towards the ruins. Now the breadth and scope of each mountain was defined as the mist evaporated, leaving only thin wisps, and the sun grew bolder. Each mountain seemed to resemble a giant animal rising from sleep. Under the sun, in the morning brightness, Huayna Picchu, which overlooks the site, was a gargantuan silver-lined lion crouching and ready to pounce. We walked slowly round the ruined city. A lone llama sat on the edge of the mountainside regurgitating grass, a mongrel sprang from nowhere and snapped at our feet before disappearing. We walked along the terraces, and through the perfectly constructed arches and temples. As in Cuzco, you could not but marvel at the way the stones were held tightly against each other without cement. And the sheer position of the city, set high up in a mountain enclave like something that has fallen to earth from another planet, made the scene doubly impressive. We felt very small in the midst of a creation of such scope and scale.
There has been much debate about the origins of Machu Picchu. Bingham wrote that this was the legendary lost city of the Andes which pre-dated the Incas and which in its last state became the ‘carefully guarded treasure house where that precious worship of the sun, the moon, the thunder and the stars, so violently overthrown in Cuzco, was restored’. A more recent theory suggests that South America’s most famous ruin was just one more royal residence and ‘pleasure house’ amongst those that dotted the Inca Empire. And yet even today it is a mystery that has yet to be fully unravelled, and it is doubtful that it ever will be with any certainty.