AMONG THOSE WHOSE INTEREST had been aroused by my article on tribal genocide in Brazil, was Tony Snowdon, who had worked for the Sunday Times as a photographer. Peter Crookston phoned to say that Snowdon would like to know if I was contemplating any more South American journeys, and if so could he come along to take the photographs. The arrangement would be a strictly professional one, and although Snowdon was at that time a member of the Royal family, no problem of protocol would exist.
The approach came at a time when I was planning a visit to Peru. I asked Peter if he thought that this was a country that would suit, and he rang a little later to say that Snowdon appeared delighted with the suggestion. Two days later Peter and I drove to Kensington Palace where Snowdon awaited us, and even at six in the morning I had the impression of a man full of enthusiasm. He said how much he was looking forward to our project and my feeling was that we should get on well together, for I much admired his photographic work, and more still the brilliant and original aviary he had recently designed for the London Zoo.
Peter drove us to Heathrow. It was a Sunday, and on the way Snowdon explained why he had particularly wanted to take this flight. Sunday, he said, was the day when people who were of interest to the press were least likely to travel, and such people, he had observed, did all they could to avoid early-morning starts. He was therefore unlikely to be bothered by reporters. In one respect Snowdon had done well, since the check-in area was virtually deserted. However, his baggage bore labels identifying them as the possession of the Right Honourable the Earl of Snowdon, and these were not likely to be overlooked. In a matter of minutes an excited young woman who was unmistakably a journalist bore down on us. Snowdon seemed to stiffen and change colour.
‘Norman,’ he said, ‘could you possibly induce her to go away?’ This, with what diplomacy I could muster, I declined to do. It was an embarrassing moment, and the first of a number of such confrontations.
At the check-in consternation reigned. We were down as travelling tourist class, as all Sunday Times journalists did, but our explanation failed to convince. Agitated conversations took place out of our hearing, before a senior staff member returned and said, ‘It seems that the tourist class is full up, sir. In the circumstances could you possibly agree to up-grading? There will of course be no charge.’ Snowdon fought a losing battle for the right to travel tourist before giving in. We took our first-class tickets, and then, as a foretaste of what was to come, were told that we would be boarding before the rest of the passengers and that ‘the limousine’ was ready to take us to the plane.
At Caracas a fuelling stop released us for a stroll in a first-class lounge decked out with tropical flowers with flies stuck to their stamens, and smelling slightly of decay. A bar was attended by a man dressed like a Venezuelan cowboy. They were serving snacks but as no English was spoken, Snowdon asked if I would order a lightly done fried egg for him. This I did, and he praised its flavour. Did I think he would have the opportunity to learn Spanish on the trip? he wondered, and I thought there would be hardly the time. He was eagerly looking forward to Peru, and had studied in advance the artistic accomplishments of the Incas, in particular their textiles which he hoped we would have time to see. I assured him that we would. Was I interested in textiles? he asked. I said I was, but I knew little about them, being stronger on ceramics. There was endless scope for study in both fields in Peru; but more than the arts it was the life of the Peruvian people that interested me. I hoped we would have time to visit parts of the country which had been bypassed by modern times and where many of the interesting customs of the past had survived. He agreed with me and said that if necessary we would make time.
We touched down at about 10 at night. I was surprised to find that, despite its proximity to the equator, Lima was both cool and misty. We took a taxi through empty streets to the hotel, which was grand in the old-fashioned style, and where we were received with dignity, but no special interest. The rooms reserved for us were well furnished in a heavy old-fashioned style. Each contained a large marble statuette of a lady who might have been Greek in the act of disrobing, and there was also a large painting of the divine eye spreading its protective rays. Snowdon had enquired at the desk if there were messages for us, and there were none. We could be certain that the telephone would not ring. The battle for anonymity had, it seemed, been won.
I was awakened by Snowdon rather earlier than I had hoped, and I was beginning to realise that he was the possessor of great physical energy, and quite clearly immune to jet-lag. At breakfast he was bubbling over with good cheer, and impressed and delighted by the decorative background of fruit, which was stacked up like an award-winning entry of a tropical harvest festival. We made plans for the forthcoming journey and I suggested a start might be made by an investigation of the Cuyocoyo area in the high Andes to the north-east of Lake Titicaca. It was the homeland of the Aymara Indians whose grandiose civilisation preceded that of the Incas. They had been enslaved over four centuries and were still fantastically exploited. I had been told that in remote mountain villages they were still compelled to carry priests in chairs and were publicly scourged for persisting in their ancient worship of Pachamama the mother-goddess, and Tio, the Devil, who is also—appropriately—god of the tin mines. Snowdon, full of agreement, and in no way discouraged by recent news of the emergence in the area of a guerrilla resistance known as the Shining Path, thought this was an excellent plan. Were the guerrillas likely to give us any trouble? he wondered. I thought not. My impression was that they had no quarrel with foreigners. And did I think that they could tell a journalist from England from Peruvian exploiters? I simply didn’t know, but suggested that we might go there and take advice from the locals, and be guided by what they suggested, and that, too, he thought was an excellent idea.
By this time there had been few breakfasters and no-one had taken the slightest notice of us, but now suddenly I was aware that Snowdon was showing signs of unease, and this clearly was due to the presence of a man carrying a camera with a long lens who had drifted into sight at the far end of the room.
‘What do you suppose he wants?’ he asked.
‘Probably the house photographer,’ I said, ‘taking holiday snaps for the guests.’
He seemed unconvinced. ‘More coffee?’ he asked.
‘No, that’s fine.’
He got up. ‘Shall we go and look round, then?’ he suggested.
There was not a great deal to see in the lounge and a view through the window of unexciting modern buildings in fog did not encourage immediate exploration of Lima. Suddenly Snowdon leapt to his feet and flung himself through a barrier of large, potted ferns through which a different cameraman had been trying to photograph him. As an expert photographer himself, he knew just what to do. The man held his ground, camera defiantly levelled, and Snowdon, taking him by the shoulders, oscillated his body violently backwards and forwards from the hips in such a way that the man could not focus on him. It was natural that this extraordinary scene should attract the attention of everyone in the vicinity and we were immediately encircled by spectators. An agitated under-manager came bounding into sight, the photographer was driven away and Snowdon retired, obviously upset, to his room.
Within minutes I was called to the phone. ‘The British Embassy is on the line for Lord Snowdon, sir, and there is no reply from his room. Could you take the call?’
I found myself talking to Anthony Walter, First Secretary, who said that the ambassador had heard that Lord Snowdon was in Lima, and wished, naturally, to welcome him, and also perhaps to suggest lunch.
It was at this moment that it first became apparent to me that our trip might not be as successful as I had hoped. I went to Snowdon’s room. ‘Do me a great favour,’ he said. ‘Please get rid of him.’
‘I can’t do that,’ I told him. ‘You’ll have to talk to him yourself.’
‘Couldn’t you just say this is a strictly private working trip?’
Back to Walter, who said, ‘I wish we could do something. Mr Morgan will be terribly hurt.’
I gave up and walked out of earshot, while Snowdon stated his terms. He would lunch with the ambassador and Mrs Morgan but he stipulated that this should be in some unassuming out-of-town restaurant where the party would avoid attention. Dress was to be informal. He himself would of course not wear a tie and perhaps Mr Morgan might care to refrain from wearing one, too.
It was clear that Mr Morgan took all this seriously, arriving at the appointed time in a large, open sports car which I felt sure he must have borrowed. He was attired in grey flannels and an open-necked white shirt, appearing to be not wholly at ease in these garments. Mrs Morgan, who was Bulgarian, had clearly decided that none of Snowdon’s restrictions applied in her case. She was a fluttery, smiling, impetuous woman who had come dressed in rustling silk and an unmanageable hat. All heads turned as we passed through the packed and rumbustious streets of Lima, and when we were held up in traffic jams or by broken-down vehicles desperate beggars rushed with arms outstretched to implore our charity. An occasional glance at Mr Morgan’s aloof profile helped to an understanding of the expression ‘gritting one’s teeth’.
The restaurant was—as required—small and acceptably remote. Several women had clearly been press-ganged into tidying the place, and, hiding their faces as we drew up, they made a flurried escape. It was a small room with a row of tables down each wall, and it was clear that a policeman lurking near the entrance would see to it that we were the only customers.
Now we faced the inevitable uphill conversational slog. Mr Morgan took on the subject of the performance by English cricketers somewhere in the West Indies, of which I knew nothing and cared little—as applied equally, I suspected, in Snowdon’s case. This was followed by a desultory attempt on the ambassador’s part to dramatise an account of the parlous state of the Peruvian anchovy-fishing industry. Mrs Morgan patched a gap in the conversation with her personal criticism of the sexual laxness of the Peruvian poor, which helped to inflate the numbers of those who could not be gainfully employed. It was following an attempt to keep this wretched conversation going, that she suddenly changed tack and dropped a clanger.
‘Lord Snowdon’ she said, ‘you will not know, but your children and mine attend the same school.’
The bleakness of the look with which this news was received did nothing to quench bubbling Balkan enthusiasm. ‘At first I cannot say to you that your children were exactly popular. No, they were not liked, but after a while I think, as you say, they shook down. Now the pupils are saying, oh well, they are human after all.’
Back in the hotel the prospect of the evening meal loomed like a storm cloud on the horizon. I asked the manager, ‘Do you expect photographers tonight?’
‘I think they will come,’ he said.
‘Is there any way they can be kept out?’
‘It is impossible,’ he said. ‘If we place a man at the door they will come through the windows. They are very persistent and they know all the tricks. A photographer will come in saying he is a plain-clothes policeman, and carrying an imitation police card. Or someone will say he has been taken ill and ask for a doctor. But the doctor is really a photographer and is carrying a camera in his bag. Nothing will keep these people out.’
‘Don’t you have a private room where we could have dinner?’
‘I will show you,’ the manager said.
It turned out that the hotel had an enormous basement banqueting chamber, only in use normally for the celebration of national festivals and for the reception of heads of state. It held thirty or forty tables and was illuminated by vast and elaborate chandeliers. At this time the furniture was covered by dust-sheets, but the manager lifted one of them to display the gilt and plush beneath.
‘It would be difficult to prepare the whole of the banqueting chamber for Lord Snowdon’s immediate use,’ the manager said, ‘but if this would suit we can certainly have a reasonable area ready. You would be private here, and if you approve we can send out immediately for some flowers to brighten up the place.’
Later that afternoon Anthony Walter from the embassy looked in at the hotel. It was to offer his services, he said, in any way that could possibly be of assistance in our journeying in the country. He was very affable and engaging. Snowdon, who had confided to me that in his view all ambassadors were twits, but clearly had no objections when it came to first secretaries, took to him, and by the end of the afternoon we were all on first-name terms, although the slightest of complications arose over Snowdon and Walter’s possession of the same first name. It transpired later when we were joined by Walter’s wife that her name was Antonia.
Walter, who almost certainly knew Peru as well as any Englishman, wondered if our visit might be made a little easier, and therefore more productive—without obligation of any kind, he stressed—by accepting a minimum of assistance and advice from the Peruvian government. There were parts of the country which he felt sure we would wish to visit which were virtually inaccessible to the private traveller. I brought up the Cuyocoyo area in which I was particularly interested, and he said it was a case in point: a place of endless fascination, temporarily out of bounds owing to the presence of guerrillas, although he knew someone in the Department of the Interior who was in a position to say yea or nay, and might be induced to say yea. Walter then went on to suggest that the ambassador might be agreeable to giving him a week or two’s local leave, in which case if we thought he could be useful to us he would be happy to come along.
Tony Snowdon seemed to jump at the idea, but I was more doubtful. What I had had in mind and had suggested to the Sunday Times was something in the nature of an adventure. Our goal was to see virgin territories and remote peoples, and though it was possible that the Peruvian authorities could help us to do this, it also seemed possible that, either off their own bat, or as a result of direction from the Foreign Office, the Embassy would do all that was possible to make sure that Snowdon was not placed at risk.
Next morning it was quite evident that the idea of slipping unnoticed in and out of Lima was the stuff of dreams, for Snowdon’s presence in the capital had already hit the headlines. It seemed probable, too, that the incident in the hotel lounge had made him enemies, as well as inspiring some inaccurate reporting. The newspaper described Walter as a bodyguard, while I started off as Martin Lewis, Editor of the Sunday Times, becoming thereafter an agent of the Secret Service. The newspapers found Snowdon either inaccessible and aloof, or aggressive. My worst fears about the degeneration of our planned adventure into a flavourless conducted tour seemed likely to be confirmed when Walter announced that he had booked seats for us in a plane to Cuzco. Although this was undoubtedly an interesting city, it had been the standby of geographical magazines for so many years that it would be difficult to say anything that had not been said many, many times before.
It was becoming clear, too, that there was a curious ambivalence in Tony’s attitude to the general public. On the previous night, extraordinary zeal had been deployed by the hotel staff to re-inject life into the mortuary atmosphere of the banqueting room, with an enclave of tables set with shining cutlery, burnished glass and a vase with the disgruntled purplish flowers that were the best that Lima could provide. Nothing could be done about the special silences of a large empty room—which the on-off purr of the air-conditioning did little to relieve—or about the penetrating odour of dust. We had taken our seats and waiters came into sight, trudging as silently as assassins towards us over the thick carpet through the desert of sheeted furniture. Between us, the manager, hotel staff and myself had achieved an isolation of the kind that Tony was unlikely to have known before. Alas, it did not please. Next day we reached the top of the stairs and he seemed to draw back. ‘Rather spooky down there,’ he said.
‘What’s it to be, then? The main dining-room?’
‘I think we should give it a try’ he said.
‘Let’s do that, then.’
The head waiter hurried to meet us. ‘You want a corner, don’t you?’ I said to Tony.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Leave it to him.’
Moments later we were seated in the dead centre of the room. Occupants of tables in the vicinity were shifting their positions to get a better view, and an Instamatic flashed nearby.
At Cuzco we were met by Guillermo, the stout and genial head of the local tourist office, and a beautiful young assistant called Milagros (miracles). Two large cars awaited, the second containing two saturnine men in dark glasses and raincoats. (As we were later told that it was unlikely to rain in Cuzco for another five months, I assumed that the raincoats were intended to conceal sub-machine guns.) A score of photographers ran hither and thither like disoriented partridges in the background, and a policeman who wore a peaked cap pulled down so that nothing could be seen of his face above the end of his nose, blew his whistle continuously. It was at this moment that I felt the ball and chain fixed in position around my ankle.
We set off on a tour of the town with Guillermo and Milagros, our bodyguards and a handful of resentful pressmen. We were also accompanied by a number of Quechua women wearing a great variety of hats, among them a white topper. All were nursing mothers and we were informed by Milagros that they were there in the belief that the beneficial influences transmitted by obviously affluent whites would improve their milk. Guillermo bombarded us with colourless statistics about the size and weight of the stones in the ancient buildings we passed. Milagros leapt about, face ravaged and arms outstretched in an attempt to depict the death-agonies of the Indian leader Tupic Amaru who had been pulled apart by horses in one of the squares. The performance ended with a loud and convincing groan. It was, however, Snowdon who captured the Quechua ladies’ attention. Tony was always ready to accept the advice of his friends, and he had been told by one of them, Michael Bentine, a native of this part of the world, that the high altitude of Cuzco might cause trouble with his breathing and he should carry oxygen equipment. This he did in the form of a tiny cylinder to which a mask was fitted. From time to time he took an obedient puff from this, and when he did so the Quechuas uttered small cries of delight. The white man was recharging his store of magic, which would certainly be all to the good of the milk.
It was a procedure that did not wholly avoid alarm in other quarters, for Milagros, who at the end of our visit was invited to dine with us, turned down the invitation as politely as possible. Guillermo took me into his confidence over the reason for this. ‘She is afraid that Milord is taking aphrodisiacs.’
When we returned to Lima Anthony Walter met us off the plane and more plans of action were discussed. He told us that the Ministry of the Interior had confirmed that guerrillas were indeed active in the area upon which I had set my sights, and it would be imprudent to travel there without a military escort, which—reasonably enough—they were reluctant to provide. Instead Walter suggested a visit to the Callejón de Huaylas, a remote valley in the Cordillera Blanca, to the north.
Eighteen months earlier, the Callejón de Huaylas had been the scene of the greatest earthquake-plus-avalanche disaster in Peruvian history and it was only now that its fearful aftermath was beginning to be cleared up. In a number of towns in this 100-mile-long, densely populated valley every building had been destroyed, and in Ranrahirca alone, 30,000 people had been buried in a single instant under millions of tons of rock, mud and ice. Apart from the tragic spectacle this offered, Walter thought that the huge relief effort invited description, and mentioned that psychiatrists had been sent from all over the world to help cope with the psychological problems of thousands of victims of the catastrophe who had been driven beyond the limits of endurance by their sufferings. Disasters at Huaylas, he said, had occurred regularly throughout history, even being recorded by the Incas. Apart from spectacular loss of life, these terrible events had induced their own medically recognised form of neurosis, prevalent in people doomed to live out their lives waiting for millions of tons of ice to fall upon them from the skies.
An agreement was reached that we should go to Huaylas and that Walter would go with us. A permit was duly obtained, while the Ministry of Information supplied a car and driver. The first stage of the journey was on the Pan American Highway northwards from Lima, with a desert strip and the sea on one side and distant mountains building up on the other. Peru is a country of spectacular fogs, into which the road plunged almost immediately. The sun striking through produced weird colour combinations and hallucinatory effects. We plunged through the surface of a mock river. Fog in dispersion drifted away in osprey plumes over the sea, at the edge of which a wave carried a row of inert pink ducks towards the shore. The sand in between had thrown up strange white peaks, delicately chiselled by the wind, with mist hanging like fine lace from their spurs. Distantly inland, the driver pointed out the Hacienda La Madrugada built in the style of Brighton Pavilion, where until a year before a special version of the droit de seigneur had been imposed, personable young Indians being condemned to sleep with the aged mistress of the estate, who at the age of eighty-seven had still continued to exercise her sexual prerogative.
Three hours later we were in the suburbs of Chimbote, until lately a charming village by the sea, but now the world’s largest fishing port—easily outdistancing any competitor in Russia or Japan—where 16,000 ex-peasants had become fishermen living in a wilderness of identical cubic shacks. Here, each year, ten million tons of fish were reduced to two million tons of fish-meal for export to all parts of the world. The terrible effluvium of the fish-mills of Chimbote can be smelt up to ten miles away and senior staff of the fish-meal companies visiting the scene of their operations are under orders to do so with gas-masks in place.
At Chimbote we were told that the road we had intended to follow into the Altiplano was not to be recommended so we turned round and drove south to Pativilca where we turned off the highway and began the climb into the Andes. Almost immediately we saw the first dramatic evidence of the disastrous earthquake of 31 May 1970. We were on one of the lateral roads of the great Inca Andean highway, which showed an almost brutal indifference to problems of gradient or terrain. Too often the view from the car windows on one side was an abyss, with the Fortaleza River curled like a bright thread at its bottom. The patches of maize and potatoes grown in these high valleys were continually showered by rockfalls from above, and those who cultivated them had been obliged to develop a technique of ploughing that involved constantly lifting the plough as the ox dodged to avoid the boulders.
The area of almost total destruction was reached under the pass at Huamba, a town which, through the munificence of some charitable organisation, had been rebuilt entirely in corrugated iron. Conococha, on the pass itself, was less fortunate. It had never been more than a street of wooden hutments, and these stood up only too well to the terrible earth convulsions that had rocked it like a ship in a heavy sea. Here, at nearly 13,000 feet and three hours from the equatorial desert of the coast, a mixture of sleet and rain was falling, and a great number of children with paeony cheeks and snotty noses came out in their soaking rags to watch us.
Two hours later, at the end of a marshy plateau, we drove into Huarez, capital of the great central valley between the two Cordilleras, the Callejón de Huaylas. It had taken the full force of the earthquake and looked like a pigmy Hiroshima; an open space with not a single building standing where once there had been a colonial town with a population of 20,000. This clear space was fringed by the hutments in which the survivors lived, awaiting the day when a start would be made on rebuilding the town.
It was this earthquake, lasting less than half a minute, that set off the dire catastrophe that followed immediately. Within seconds of the shock one million cubic metres of ice broke away from the highest point of the glacier of Huascarán and, falling some thousand feet, detached another 24 million cubic metres. The avalanche, travelling at 250 mph, reached and buried Ranrahirca in one minute and forty seconds. Throughout history, all those who could do so have lived in Yungay, in belief that security was offered by a protective hill, yet this town, too, disappeared instantly from sight under some thirty feet of mud and rocks. When we arrived there nothing whatever remained to indicate the buried town’s presence except the tops of four palm trees, still alive, protruding from the sea of debris covering its central square.
As there had been so few survivors it was hard to find anyone to talk to who had been in the vicinity at the time of the disaster but in the end we spoke to a group of Quechuas who had been to put flowers tied up in plastic bags over the spot where they believed their families to be buried under a great sallow sea of what could have been broken-up cement. The problem had been to recreate a phantom identity of streets and squares, and to decide where the dead lay in relation to them. Gradually, by agreement, a shadow town-plan had been worked out, and now on the surface of the otherwise featureless rubble there appeared orderly rows of little crosses, much like war-graves, except that here they were gathered in small clusters—in one case with as many as thirty over the spot where a particularly numerous family had lived.
The Quechuas described apocalyptic moments: first the rumble and roar of the earthquake coming in, with the sound of an express train in a tunnel; the earth heaving and plunging and shaking itself—then, seconds later, the screech of the oncoming landslide. One of the men had been saved with his young son because they had been out to look for strayed sheep in a nearby village. They had been flung to the ground, showered with earth and pummelled by flying stones. Uprooted trees had come crashing down around them and in a matter of minutes, as the great dust cloud went up (that over Ranrahirca had reached 18,000 feet), the day had gone dark. Hours later, after groping their way over landslides, round earth-fissures, and wading through floods produced by the damming of the Santa River, they reached the spot where the town had once been, to find their world at an end.
We stayed the night in austere conditions at Quiravilca. From this an ancient and narrow Inca road, with terrible gradients, unlimited blind bends and sickening views of rivers threading through abysses thousands of feet below, twists down to the coast. A notice at the entrance to the road warns the traveller by car on no account to attempt this climb before 11 am, by which time the fog had normally cleared, and the road had had time to dry. Walter beseeched us not to ignore the warning, and when called upon for an opinion the driver only mentioned in the most matter-of-fact way that his brother had gone over the top in the previous year. Tony told us that he had an appointment to keep down at Trujillo on the coast. Through lack of experience of the continent, what he did not know was that South Americans as a whole do not exaggerate in such warnings of danger. He wanted to push on, so at 9 am, over a wet road and through a light fog, we started the climb.
The road was steep from the start. Water dripped from overhanging ledges on to a black surface which glistened in places as if smeared with oil. From the outset our driver, Pedro, gave the impression of being almost excessively relaxed. He had the face of an Inca, with a forehead sloping steeply back in the admired fashion, and exaggerated by many loving mothers by binding a board tightly to the forepart of the cranium in early infancy. Walter, who sat in the front, was perturbed by the fact that Pedro never fully opened his eyes and occasionally let one hand drop from the wheel. When Walter asked him sternly why he never sounded his horn on bends, his reply implied that he felt that to do so called into question the arrangements of Providence. We came to the spot where his brother had lost his life, and stopped for a few seconds to peer down into the micro-landscape at the bottom of the chasm beneath us. He bowed slightly, smiled and said, ‘He had completed his destiny.’ Asked by Walter what had actually happened, he said that his brother had collided with a bus whose driver had fallen asleep. Did this often happen? Walter asked, and Pedro told him, not often, but sometimes. The high altitude made drivers drowsy, and in addition they were usually tired. It was possible to drop off sometimes for a second or two without running off the road. He had done it himself. At this point he mentioned a local custom by which passengers seated on the side of the car away from a precipitous edge often opened their doors on a bend to enable them to jump to safety in case of an uncontrollable skid.
From Quiravilca to Trujillo it was about eighty miles as the crow flies but the road wound through peaks which must have added half as much again to that distance. Buses managed to collect enough passengers in this tremendous wilderness to make the trip worthwhile, and there were more of them than I would have thought possible. On one occasion we were edging inch by inch past a crowded bus under the impassive stare of a dozen nursing mothers, pink-cheeked under their pantomime hats. Their menfolk had lashed themselves to the luggage racks on the roof. To our left we looked down on thousands of feet of vapour. ‘Surely that driver is asleep,’ I said to Pedro. ‘No, sir,’ was the reply. ‘He is thinking. The eye of God is upon us all.’
Crossing the mountains had taken ten hours, for it was seven in the evening and pitch dark by the time we reached the coast road and the suburbs of Trujillo. This, I knew, was another occasion when the objectives of our Peruvian expedition, as planned, were to be pushed further from sight. Tony’s presence in the country produced a degree of interest and excitement disproportionate, as he would have heartily agreed, to the importance of the happening. The fact was that this was a country where remarkably little occupied the press apart from the dismal merry-go-round of politics, an occasional coup or counter-coup, the stale old joke of projected reforms, religious and social news, the fluctuations of the stock market, horoscopes and lengthy obituaries. Now, at least, there was something new for the headlines.
Discouragingly, our stay in Trujillo had been scrupulously organised. A lunch had been arranged at the Golf Country Club. After that a display of local arts and crafts was to be followed by an equestrian parade led by a famous rejoneador, Hugo Bustamante, who would demonstrate the manoeuvres used in bullfighting on horseback.
The situation at the Golf Country Club when we arrived was not promising. The exuberance of our hosts’ welcome seemed overshadowed by preoccupation, and by the small crises that raged round them. It was whispered to us that a number of guests had turned up without bothering to be invited and that this had played havoc with the seating arrangements. Meticulous records of ancestry were kept in such Latin American towns, and a man with a forefather who had been included among Pizarro’s licentious soldiery cannot be seated next to a man who has only made a lot of money or even, if he is enough of a snob, a great bullfighter. There was a problem, too, with the sun. The lunch was held in the club’s gardens and when extra tables had to be brought they could not be squeezed into the limited shade, and some of the ladies could be heard complaining.
Amid these distractions, and momentarily unnoticed, Tony had slipped away to occupy a defensive position at one end of a bench, and called upon me to take the vacant seat on the other side. Asked why, he said it was to make sure that no woman could creep up on him and seat herself where she could be photographed. Such pictures, he said, were usually brought to the attention of ‘his wife’s sister’.
Next day we drove to Chanchan, the capital between 1150 and 1450 of the relatively short-lived Chimu empire, which spread through the deserts north of Trujillo to the borders of Ecuador. This city, the largest of all those of pre-Conquest South America, had come into being purely through technological discoveries in the area of irrigation. Previously the coastal peoples had lived well enough on the fish provided by this corner of the Pacific in superabundance; by way of dietetic variation in an area where rain never fell, wild potatoes could be dug out of the banks of the Mocha River. The great breakthrough happened when the decision was taken to dig canals diverting the water into fields, and what must have been many thousands of people got together to build a canal fifty miles in length across the desert to top up the failing water supply in the Mocha from the valley of the Chicama.
The Mocha area now became the market garden of North Peru and its huge and sudden affluence was reflected in this stunning city, an architect’s dream of the day, and in some respects even of this day, too. It was designed and built by men of extraordinary vision and brand-new ideas. Geometry, supposed to have been invented in ancient Egypt, made its spontaneous appearance here and became almost a craze.
Development was carried out under the strictest of controls. Chanchan contains ten self-contained complexes, each based on a single model and a town in its own right. All buildings are symmetrical and rectangular and set precisely at right-angles to one another. The remnants of long straight walls still enclose its streets. These were decorated with monkeys and birds presented in an abstract woodland scene. Patches of this decoration that remain intact show no attempt at variation. The same animals and birds in the same frozen postures feature throughout.
Perhaps an enormous and unprecedented project of this kind, employing gangs of workers rather than devoted craftsmen, demanded standardisation. Chanchan was supremely functional, with every citizen correctly housed according to his status. There were no slums, this ancient city being enormously in advance in this respect of anything Europe of the Middle Ages had to offer. It was as devoid of excitement or surprise as a succession of identical concourses in an airport building. A citizen walking between these walls, with nothing to engage his interest but the same monkey, the same parrot, and the same bunch of leaves, must surely have preferred to stare straight ahead. A theory has been put forward that the straitjacket of architectural standardisation led eventually to decadence in the arts, the elimination of the individual masterpiece, and a sort of mass production in which, for example, a superb pottery head made to the order of a wealthy patron sits squarely upon the shoulders of one of a series of identical bodies.
In Trujillo we had been shown a famous collection of Mochica-Chimu effigy pots. Millions, possibly, of these ceramic masterpieces have been recovered from temples and graves, and there is no aspect of the potter’s world that they do not portray. All forms of human and animal activity are registered: a female patient is visited by a doctor who, while examining her pelvis, caresses a breast. Another woman, naked, bends over a pot to wash her hair. A man smashes an enemy’s head with his axe. Prisoners dragging what look like anchors are driven from the battlefield. A llama scratches its ear. Frogs copulate, a dentist knocks out a tooth, a parrot examines a newly hatched chick.
Sexual intercourse in its many varieties and every conceivable perversion is a favourite theme; the potters pried into every carnal secret with a searching eye for anatomical detail. Fellatio is scrupulously observed. Intercourse takes place between old men and young girls, and more remarkably between young men and old women. Three-in-a-bed situations are common. The Mochica-Chimu taste for sodomy was only curtailed by the coming of the Spanish Inquisition, and a famous pot shows a man sodomising a girl lying between her sleeping parents. What is extraordinary is that in this authoritarian, highly protective society, in which the death penalty was imposed for a number of crimes, such aberrations could escape even censure.
Before we left we were presented with a pot apiece. Mine took the form of a frog, dating from the period immediately before the Chimu kingdom collapsed under attack by the Incas. This fine animal, about six times life-size, has no part in the extreme realism of the Mochican potter’s art. All minor physical details have been suppressed. The rugose skin has become featureless, polished hide, the legs have been hardly more than sketched in. What remains is halfway to an amphibious abstraction. There remains a face wearing a tolerant, quizzical expression and the slyest of smiles.
We arrived back in Lima in good time to fulfil an engagement upon which Anthony Walter appeared to set exceptional store. This was a visit to the most exclusive club in Peru. Walter told us that the secretary had added proudly that it was probably the most exclusive in the whole of South America, for it excluded positively anyone without an ancestor who had ridden with the small band of desperadoes who had destroyed the empire of the Incas, or was the possessor of less land than could be ridden round comfortably in three days.
My suspicion, going by something he had let drop, was that Walter was hoping to get a few paragraphs into the national press that would show Tony in a favourable light. I guessed that photographers would be kept out of sight for this occasion, and that any reporters allowed in would have guaranteed to make none of the usual references to what was rumoured to be an unsuccessful marriage.
Before setting out on this venture it occurred to me to consider with some doubt in my mind the way in which Tony had decided to dress. He had an almost obsessive preference for informality in the matter of attire. At this moment he presented himself in an open-necked sports shirt and tightly fitting, slightly flared trousers with a high waistband. This was his favourite outfit and had never failed to attract discreet glances when in the company of Peruvians who stuck to dark lounge-suits and club ties even in a desert environment. ‘They can be extremely conservative in this part of the world,’ I said. What was intended as a word of warning was lightly brushed aside. ‘Can they?’ he asked. ‘Well, what of it?’
The Club Nacionál was located on the main street and had an unassuming entrance. Walter pressed the bell and I was slightly startled when the door was opened instantly by some kind of club servant with a face devoid of feeling or thought in a way that could have only been achieved by years of practice.
He was staring at Snowdon. Walter explained the purpose of our visit, and the man, still looking at Tony and speaking English with hardly a trace of an accent, said, ‘Sir, you are not wearing a tie. I regret I am unable to admit you.’
Tony uttered a light, triumphant laugh. ‘As it happens I was waiting for this,’ he said. He pulled a scarf from his pocket and tied it round his neck. Nothing changed in the man’s face. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘you are not wearing a jacket, I am still not allowed by the rules to ask you to enter.’
‘I see,’ Walter said. ‘Well, this seems all rather unexpected. Is there someone I can talk to? Surely the secretary is available? We have an appointment with him.’
‘I’m obliged to abide by the rules,’ the man said. ‘What I can do is to admit you to the club’s sports area and I will arrange for someone to see you there.’
We exchanged blank looks. I was bewildered, as no doubt the others were, too. Had there ever existed a diplomatic precedent, I wondered, upon which Anthony Walter could draw for guidance as to how to handle an incident of this kind? And then a page boy was at our side indicating that we should follow him, and he led us out of the main entrance down a side-turning and back into the building again through a low narrow door.
For a moment all I could register was noise, but odour followed closely on the heels of this impression. We were in a huge room containing a swimming-pool, and a number of men in swim-shorts were chasing each other round the margin of this, hurling themselves or anyone they could catch up with into the water, with great, bellowing cries of pretended fury or of mirth, and constant use of the favourite Peruvian oath, ‘I shit on God.’ Every few seconds a high diver hit the water with a monstrous watery explosion that drowned for a split second the slap of running feet, the noise of horseplay, the oaths and the mocking laughter. The smell was of wet bodies, stale towels, chlorine and water.
A man in a tracksuit padded up, chewing with eyes averted. He grabbed a folded table and three chairs leaning against the wall, opened them up and nodded to us to take possession of them. Later he appeared with three cups of coffee on a tray. One saucer was full of spilt coffee and he snatched it away and splashed the coffee on the floor. He had placed the table against the wall next to a revolving door through which half-naked men came and went endlessly. Walter called back the man and asked him in a pause in the uproar if anyone knew that we were there, to which he replied, ‘I haven’t the faintest.’ Five minutes, perhaps, passed while we looked at each other in silence, then Tony got up and left through the revolving door and we followed him.
We were to have spent an hour at most on this visit and the embassy had arranged that it was to be followed by a friendly and completely informal call—from which Walter and I had been excused—on one of the government ministers who was believed by the embassy to share with Tony an interest in the arts. This appointment Tony now decided he no longer wished to keep. ‘I have a desperate headache,’ he said to Walter. ‘Could you possibly get in touch with the man and explain that I’m feeling a bit under the weather.’
We dropped him off at the hotel and drove on to the ministry. ‘I have to admit I have a bit of a headache, too,’ Walter said. ‘I simply don’t know what I’m going to say to the ambassador. It has been an appalling morning.’
‘But does it really matter so very much whether he was shown round the club or not?’ I asked.
‘The trouble is that a member of the Royal Family has been snubbed. It’s my job to see that things like this don’t happen. I only hope and pray that this one doesn’t get into the papers. Does he read them, by the way?’
‘No, he asks me what they say.’
‘And you tell him?’
‘Yes, but I leave bits out.’
‘Is he enjoying himself?’
‘Most of the time. He seems exceptionally vulnerable to the kind of incident we’ve just experienced.’
‘I wonder why.’
‘I do too.’
I dropped Walter off at the ministry. ‘Best of luck with the minister,’ I said, and he made a face and shook his head.
Back at the hotel I found that the storm had blown itself out. We lunched in the centre of the main dining-room where Tony drew admiring glances and unhesitatingly agreed to autograph a menu passed to him by the waiter. So what had the upset been about? I found it mysterious that this intelligent man had been thrown so much off balance by the pinpricks of that morning. It had been a grotesque affair at the club, a scene from a play in the mood of Waiting for Godot, with a peer of the realm, a diplomat and a writer, hunched together, heads almost touching over cold coffee in a malodorous pandemonium, awaiting what?—the figment of a ceremony that had passed out of someone’s mind. Surely this was less a cause for fury than a farcical memory to be put in store for the amusement of one’s friends in years to come? Tony alternatively craved and detested the presence of others. He snubbed ambassadors and rebuffed hard-working pressmen. Our first supper in the hotel had been lugubriously consumed among the dust-sheets of a subterranean room, then suddenly and inexplicably next day we were upstairs among the Instamatics and the sycophantic smiles. What was to explain these violent fluctuations of mood?
Tony was the most intelligent, interesting and active member of the Royal Family, but even he may not have been wholly able to escape the syndrome consequent upon an over-long exposure to the inanities of palaces.
Most of the Latin American countries celebrated the feast of San Cipriano, patron of jugglers, magicians and the black arts, of which we had heard that something could be seen on the following night. In Salvador, Brazil, where the living came closer than elsewhere to the dead, it had been amalgamated with the day of All Souls, and was one of the most spectacular folk manifestations of the western world. But in Lima, we were assured, it was a hole-in-the-corner affair reflecting little of its impressive and rather sinister past. The voodoo performers of old had been wiped out by the police in combination with the Church. These were no longer secret, orgiastic meetings at which the gods of fire and water were worshipped. Here and there mediums in their trances still listened to the voices of those beyond the grave, but no-one any longer paid much attention to what they had to say. So in these days, was there anything worthwhile to be seen of the old carnival of death? we asked our driver, and he thought not. He had heard of a procession of devil-worshippers wearing masks in one of the remote barrios, he said, and he offered to take us to the place.
The slums of Lima were said to be the most extensive in Latin America and we made a cautious and difficult incursion into the labyrinth of shacks saturated with the shallow elation and deep melancholy of the poor. The lights of distant cooking fires and weak oil-lamps pricked through the gloom. With extreme care the driver skirted the banks of open sewers, young children mewed round us like kittens, boys beat drums, and the howling of dogs marked out a black horizon. There were no enchanters or processions here. We turned back into the town, finding ourselves immediately in a tiny, run-down square surrounded by tall wooden houses, and here, where the lights had come on again, a small but dense crowd had gathered to watch something that was happening, or had happened, out of sight from the car.
We pulled up and got out, pushing our way through to the front of the crowd where we found a boy of about twelve lying spreadeagled on the ground, and evidently unconscious. He had fallen, we were told, from the roof of the three-storey building under which he lay. A small, hushed murmur reached us from people commenting on this happening in an undertone, otherwise this could have been a church congregation. No-one moved.
I broke the silence. ‘Have they phoned for a doctor? Is the ambulance coming?’
‘No phone here,’ a man said. ‘No ambulance. No doctor.’
‘Is the boy going to be left lying here? Why’s nobody doing anything?’
‘Nothing we can do. The doctors don’t come out as far as this.’
It was only at this moment I realised that all the men had taken off their hats. ‘We’re here out of respect,’ the man said.
Tony was looking over my shoulder. I picked the boy up in my arms. The crowd opened up for us and I carried him to the car. I was trying to hold him in such a way that his head was supported in case the neck-vertebrae had been damaged. ‘We’re taking him to hospital,’ I told the driver.
It was a long drive through mean streets and under fogged stars. The hospital lay on the frontier of a development area with nothing in it finished through lack of funds, a bleak rectangular block among a thicket of pipes, wire and corrugated iron.
‘No-one about,’ the driver said. ‘Very late. Maybe all gone home.’ I sensed an undercurrent of relief. Nothing had to be done. He had been born in one of the slums where resignation was interchangeable with hope. We lowered the boy into the back seat where he lay shoring softly, and made our way to the door.
We rang the bell. A wan, dust-blurred light showed behind the window, there was a scraping of footsteps, followed by the clunk of a bolt being drawn, then a cautious face appeared in the opening of the door.
This, as the door opened inch by inch, we saw to be a woman dressed in a garment that was something between a nun’s habit and a nurse’s uniform. I explained what had happened and she shook her head. ‘No-one here. Come back tomorrow,’ she said, and was about to close the door when Tony pushed past her and I followed. ‘This boy is dying,’ I said. ‘He fell from the top of a house.’ She joined the tips of her fingers together, shook her hand violently, then drew an imaginary line in front of my face. ‘Everything locked,’ she said. ‘Nothing we can do at this time of night’ She had set her teeth, and now thrust forward her jaw.
I translated this for Tony’s benefit and he said in a loud voice, ‘I insist on seeing a doctor. We will not go away until a doctor comes. Tell her to bring a doctor immediately.’
His words, clear and firm, had an immediate effect. The woman’s clenched fingers opened, and her jaw muscles relaxed. When she spoke it was in a different and reasonable voice. ‘It will take half an hour for the doctor to come,’ she said.
‘Go and get him,’ Tony said. ‘Tell him we are waiting here, and that he must come at once.’
There was no doubt that she understood, and that she had surrendered to an imperative that was not to be evaded. She gestured to us to fetch the boy from the car and by the time we had carried him through the door she was ready with a trolley, in which he was laid in such a way that she could support his head, while we wheeled him down a passage into what was unmistakably the casualty ward.
A single switch provided relentless illumination of our surroundings. It was clear that the ward had been instantly abandoned at the end of the working day and that the nursing staff, the orderlies and porters, and those who did the clearing up, had dropped everything and fled in a dash for freedom. Hair-clippings, bloodied swabs and the debris of food were strewn across surfaces of cracked tiles. A hosepipe like a moribund serpent curled across the floor, its nozzle in a shallow, pinkish pool which proved that a final sluicing-down had not been well done. A small man in a surgeon’s coat came through the door at the end of the ward and approached us. He had a white, lightly tobacco-stained beard, and hands almost as small as a monkey’s. He bent over the trolley, lifted an eyelid, and felt with a tiny hand for the heartbeat. His expression was kindly and concerned. ‘Is unconscious,’ he said in English. He shook his head.
‘How bad is he?’ Tony asked. ‘Can you save him?’
‘Is necessary an operation,’ the doctor said. ‘But first X-rays and observation. We cannot work in dark. When we have information, operation can take place. Now no radiologist persons, no specialist doctor.’
‘So there’s nothing whatever to be done?’
‘Tonight nothing possible. This operation very difficult, only one specialist doctor can make this operation. Tomorrow at eight you may telephone for news. But now nothing.’
Tony was extremely concerned about this incident. We rang the hospital first thing in the morning but were unable to speak to anyone who could tell us what was happening, nor, for a while, to anyone who could even locate one patient. Some hours later we were able to speak to a doctor who could only say that no operation had taken place, and such were the problems of Spanish medical terminology that only one thing seemed clear: that in this case any operation would be a difficult one. Tony had formed the opinion—perhaps not unreasonably in a situation where this boy, had we not intervened, would have been left to die by the side of the road—that even now his chances of survival were slight, and he approached Anthony Walter with a suggestion. This was that the patient should be flown to England for the operation, and while Mr Morgan agreed that it would be a nice thing if it could be done, it was inevitable that the question should arise of who was to bear the cost, and I concluded that the idea was dropped.
Peru had not been an outstanding success, for we had seen little of the real country. A journalist may pass unperceived among the crowd and is sometimes rewarded by experiences from which the foreign traveller is carefully steered away. Tony’s appearances in the headlines ruled out this possibility so that in the end what came to be written about Peru was hardly more startling than the information offered in the average travel brochure.
A few days later it was time for me to move on. Tony appeared in no hurry to return to London, deciding in the mean while to visit an uncle in the Caribbean, where he invited me to join him, but I had commitments elsewhere. Minutes before my plane took off from Lima Airport I was subjected to a baffling experience. A stewardess called me to the plane’s open door where three Indians stiff in well-pressed suits, begloved and with highly polished shoes waited to see me. The man in the centre held a cushion on which rested three tiny white strips of bone. It was a moment of acutely mixed emotions in which embarrassment predominated. There was no way of knowing what these men wanted with me although it was clear that their presence was allied to the drama of the injured boy. It was evident, too, that an operation had taken place, but what had been the result? These obsidian Indian faces gave no clue to the answer. This was a ceremony in which I was invited to join, but was it in mourning a death or of thanksgiving for salvation? No-one in this plane, the stewardess at my back assured me, understood Quechua. This was a silence that could not be broken. Could it be that these slivers of bone had been brought as an offering in gratitude for my action, which I should accept? Since I would never know, all I could do, stiffening the muscles of my face in an attempt to match an Indian absence of expression, was to touch the bones with the tips of my fingers which the Indians watched unblinkingly. Then we all bowed and withdrew.
I suspected that the Indian boy’s fate was the one episode of the Peruvian journey that would always remain in my mind. Had he survived the operation, or had he died? Despite all subsequent enquiries the enigmatic presence of the three Quechuas—still visible as tiny, motionless figures at the edge of the runway as the plane took off—was never solved.