At Home and Abroad

by V. S. Pritchett

  They are set out, capped by their ice helmets and snow shields, with the flash and the packed shadows of some endless encampment of chivalry standing around its tents; and on clean, blue afternoons, as we fly along them hour after burning hour, we cannot hide the feeling that the wit of man in his roaring dragonfly is triumphantly vying with the majesty of nature. They have mere pedestrian eternity; we have been given these immortal moments. There are very few boring flights in South America—the drama of climate and geography, of sea and jungle, sees to that. But this flight down the Andes is one of the superb ones. Ocean, desert and mountain compose themselves into a spectacle which, I think, cannot be surpassed on earth—for the Himalayas have not the sea to set them off—and the sight holds for fifteen hundred miles.

  And, if so much of the sublime becomes monotonous, there is the strange bamboozling of the cold Humboldt ocean current to trick the eye. Small balletlike puffs of cloud come over the sea an hour or so off Lima and gradually curdle and thicken until they are a solid floor beneath us. It covers the desert, moves in among the lower hills until a whole new fantastic region of false milky harbors, misleading bays and lagoons without reality is created as the sun sinks. We are gradually deceived by the new, untrue version of the coast, and when the plane suddenly turns and takes a steep dive into the cloud over Lima, we get the fright of our lives. We have forgotten the cloud floor; we think we are diving into the sea, and come through low over the sunless roofs of Lima to a landing that is just this side of hysteria.

  Under its pan of gray cloud Lima is Londonish. Its pavements are always wet and greasy in the small hours at which, inevitably, you set out on all South American journeys. Lima ought to be an oven, but the cloud from the Humboldt current has made it livable. You sweat in the sun, but there is a deadly cold and continual flutter of air in the ears; you shiver in the heat. It is really a pleasant climate made for civilization, like the climate of Chile or the Mediterranean, but you have to get used to it and use the Peruvian cunning. I was ill in Lima. The Peruvian doctor said, “Don’t go to the mountains yet.” The maid said, “Don’t go out today. There is a cloud.”

  It is a city of flowers. In the cloisters of the University—the oldest in South America—you might be in one of the ecstatic patios of Seville; in the gardens and avenues that run down to the sea at Miraflores, along the smart corniche and in the gardens of the hotels, the tropical trees blossom heavily and all blooms are brilliant and large. You walk at a saunter, taking peaceful breaths. You are breathing something else. What is it? It ought to be the serenity of the Mediterranean, but here, in Peru, the serenity is what they call “the Pacific sadness,” a loneliness in the midst of well-being that comes, perhaps, of looking across a sun-slashed ocean for thousands of miles, into nothing. The Andes lock out the wars and troubles of the world.

  The Peruvian quarrels are internal, bursting out in coups d’état, in abortive revolutions, in pronunciamientos, ending in the execution against some village wall, in imprisonment on that island of San Lorenzo that floats like a distant liner out at sea, or in the indignant newspaper articles of the exiles; but these are the savageries of what is really family life. “Here,” people of the middling sort say, “we can live at peace.”

  Earthquakes, sudden incursions of new wealth from oil at Talara, from mines, precious stones, wool, tea and cotton, have destroyed a great deal of the old Lima, with its single-story houses with the iron-grilled windows, the high doors, balconies, the painted porches and the inner courts. Round the pretty square of the Pueblo Libre with its remarkable National Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology—it has the richest archaeological collection in Peru, indeed in South America—and in the streets by the bullring, you see the old city. Life here is simple and shuttered. It goes on in courtyards, roofed by matting against the sun, where the smoke of the charcoal fires rises and the flowers grow and the mulattoes and cholos sprawl with their hats over their eyes and the tarry-haired women call out. The old Lima had its fantastics. There is a pagodalike building near the bullring, built (I was told) by a jealous rich man so that his wife could sit at the top of the painted-glass tower and, from this purdah, see the bullfight for nothing.

  Of course, the fine, new white schools and popular suburbs, the streets of painted villas, the mixture of architectural styles copied from the Californian and Mexican and the half-timbered Tudor English, are dramatically modern. They indicate that (with Venezuela and Colombia) Peru is solid in the South American boom, and by solid we mean it can deal abroad in foreign exchange and not be on the rocks like Bolivia, shaking like Chile, unbalanced like the Argentine and living breathlessly off its prospects like Brazil. Oil! There is a sigh of relief. And if not oil, there are mines hardly touched, in the mountains.

  No South American state speaks well of another. To the rest, Peru is at once privately fantastic, outwardly formal in the Spanish manner, stuck fast in pride and the past. Peru has some of the Spanish pomp, the lazy official pride, the obstinate and moneyed addiction to custom. Pizarro founded Lima; he is buried in the cathedral. The city was the solid administrative capital of Spanish rule.

  The struggle between the outlying regions and the center goes on in all South American states. Here, in Peru, where distances are great, local corruption and indifference is the inevitable result of overpowering central government. The Inquisition looked after religious heresy; but Lima had the administrators and the seventeenth-century courtiers, the vested interest in the distribution of trade that Spain imposed, and even the caste system that put the creole (or colonist) under the thumb of the Spaniard. Spain had even the fantastic notion that it could reconquer Peru as late as 1866, after Peru had known independence for a generation.

  There is a somnolent weightiness in the Spanish inheritance, the habit of sitting impregnably on wealth, the strengthening of related families into nations within the nation. Brash, pushful, Italianized people from the Argentine come up to Lima and find society impenetrable. They play polo with the rich but never find friendship. As in Spain, casual encounters everywhere; in the home never. The young girls are chaperoned. There is even a fixed day upon which sea bathing begins; it would be solecism, vagrancy, a sin, to bathe a day sooner. Custom, custom! Lima has its tea hour, as elegant as it used to be in Madrid in the ’20s. The rich women and their beautiful daughters sit stiffly, speechlessly, dressed by Fath and Dior, manacled in gold, set off by diamonds and emeralds in that silent and most deadly of all warfares of women: the warfare of jewelry. Each diamond is an accurate shot at neighboring diamonds in the room; even more it is brilliant with contempt for the luxury of Buenos Aires, Rio or New York. The flash of a sugar estate answers the challenge of an oil well or a mine, the fortune of a hacienda weighs itself against the emeralds of a fortune cut out of the Andean rock.

  Behind the glitter are the ruthless struggles of politics, the suppressed political parties. And as the tea party goes on, the German, American and British engineers and commercial men go boisterously past the tables, having already drunk too much. Foreign capitalism has built the railroads, the factories, drilled the wells and opened up the country. With intelligence and disdain the clever and lethargic Peruvians watch the aliens and then drive off in their Cadillacs to enjoy themselves, or sit playing poker dice and sending out messages by the page boys.

  And, being Spanish, Lima has kept the bullfight, where the other countries, except Venezuela, are either bored by it or have forbidden it. The bullring is across the bridge at the top of the city, under the mountain that looks like Vesuvius in the sun-shot haze, that gives a veil of blue heat when the cloud gives way to the sun and the skin begins to burn. I went twice to the bullring, first when it was empty and they were sweeping the sand and cleaning it for the corrida on the next day, in the company of an excitable Argentine who, with the push and intensity of his race, wanted to know the points.

  “Look now,” said the shameless Argentine, a serious man and a polo player, a colonel in the army and an old enem
y of Perón—which was why he had left his country—“look now,” he said to the mulatto guide. “Explain to me. I know nothing. I am the bull now”—he crouched—“you are the picador. Now you try to get the lance—where? Here? On the shoulder. Right. Then why does the crowd whistle with disapproval? What have you done wrong?” “Gone in too deeply,” said the mulatto in his hoarse kind voice. Up and down the alley, the mulatto in his shabby jeans and singlet was playing the sporting colonel, making veronicas and coming in for the moment of truth. “Good, now I understand,” the Argentine said. The mulatto looked with dignity and grave irony at the excitable man and winked at his mistakes. “Come and have a bottle of beer,” said the colonel.

  We saw the bulls arrive in their packing cases. We sat sweating in a bar on a street noisy with grinding trams and a jukebox. It was the day for getting ready for the annual fiesta, the religious procession of the Señor de los Milagros, the image of the Christ that was strangely preserved in one of Lima’s disastrous earthquakes. The mulatto, a huge, heavy man in his fifties with a rolling walk, was one of those who would bear the image for his parish, expiating—as he gently said—his sins.

  That night the procession shuffled round the streets, the crowds blackened, the booths of the open-air fair were lit up; over the loudspeakers came the voice of a popular priest in the full, angry roar of Spanish imprecation, scarifying the sins of the multitude and making their skin tingle with the dread of eternal punishment. His was a blasting and relentless voice whipping up the lethargy of the passing crowds in the night.

  Peruvians, like Spaniards, get the bull fever young. A boy of ten beside me was disputing the finer points of the corrida with his father, but both were seized, as the whole ring was seized, by that short, frightening and unanimous gasp of admiration which punctuates the intensely critical calm of the bullfight with short crises of masculine ecstasy. There was a Venezuelan who circled like a heavenly messenger with unfailing banderillas, but who was uncertain in all else and unnerved at the kill. Just before he thrust home the sword, some man bawled out to him, “Do better than last time!” Even the easygoing Peruvians have inherited the Spanish gift for total abuse.

  There was a young, plump Portuguese in pale blue who looked as if he lived on sweet cakes and had been trained for the ballet, who swept us all by his courage and his art. He fought like a rocket breaking and blooming into star after star. There was a young Spaniard, new to Lima, wonderfully indifferent as he dominated the bull. When the bulls got bored and the fighting went all over the place, Lima shouted out satirically, as Seville does, “Music! Music!” asking the band to play in contempt. And scarves, coats, purses, handbags went down in showers in the moments of triumph. There is one tall gentleman of great dignity in Lima who sends his straw hat spinning into the ring when he is pleased, and it goes spinning faultlessly back to him, so that it is never off his head for more than twenty seconds. For twenty seconds that man has his public triumph.

  After the fight in Lima, the indispensable thing is to go to the open-air stalls outside the ring and eat chopped sheep’s hearts, grilled over charcoal on a bamboo skewer, and dipped in three or four tongue-tearing yellow sauces. There is only one that is hotter: the violent Peruvian onion. “What wonderful superstructure these Lima girls have,” my shouting Argentine said as we drove away, pointing in two or three directions in a scream of brakes, horns and police whistles. Only one thing, he indicated, was missing: an earthquake.

  The narrow streets were packed with people walking up and down in families, the girls looking at the silver and the jewelry in the windows and now and then an Indian running among them. Ignoring the traffic lights, the cars shot over the crossings. Men and women went into the churches, those richly furnished churches of much gold and crowded carving, to sit, to kneel and burn a candle at the favored altar. In the square outside the cathedral and the palace of the president were the scarlet guards caught by the floodlighting against the white stone, while the easy crowds lay on the grass or walked in the spring warmth, ate their sweet cakes and drank their fruit juices. In their faces there were often traces of the hard Indian bone or the narrow slit of the Indian eyes, the hard look of a lost Asia; and sometimes of an Asia left only two generations ago, in the survivors of those Chinese who were brought over to build the Peruvian railways. These new countries devour people and races, but the survivors make their obdurate corner somewhere: the Chinese are now the grocers of Lima.

  The main avenues under the perfumed trees were lipsticked with neon lights, the car doors banged all night, the newsboys bawled papers in the streets, the mothers were at home, the demimonde sat, with equal formality, in their appropriate places, the old men rolled their poker dice round their bottle of beer and the foreign snobs drank their whiskey.

  Which century is one in: the seventeenth of the courtly Spaniards? Two thousand years back with the Indians? In the twentieth with the international contact? In the twenty-first with the restless cholo or mestizo triumphantatlast? In a Cadillac? In some grinding nineteenth-century tram? On a mule?

  You sense the violence of a life cut up into frontiers of race, politics and fortune. You go away doped by the narcotic smell of the white bells of the floripondio tree, outstared by the flowers of the tropics and the new buildings, remembering the golden dust of the Andes, daydreaming about the fortunes buried there.

  This is an age of building and strung-up nerves. For Lima grows. Attracted by the wealth, depressed by life on the great estates, the mixed and Indian people pour into Lima, pour out and stake their claims in the desert, seep here and there into the new schools and universities, either sink into misery or go to swell the beginnings of a new middle class.1

  “The past. The past,” people say. “The future. The people.” Cry and countercry are in your ears as you fly away.

  The visitor to Cuzco flies there in two or three hours from Lima, spends a few days there, takes the light railway to Machu Picchu and then flies back from Cuzco to Lima. You can travel to Cuzco by train—they supply oxygen at the great altitudes—but it takes a long time. I flew there. It is the most exciting short flight in South America.

  On this flight the Andes give us one more sensation. We have flown beside them and kept our distance; now it remains for us to fly over them, to exchange voluptuousness for a terror that, at the breaking point, suddenly becomes the sublime. We have looked down upon the patterns of desert or plain and have had the impression of seeing a mind in the earth itself and of reading its hieroglyph. But when we cross the Andes they rise up and assault the flier. When we cross those hundreds of miles of peaks and brown ranges, the rock wilderness that lies between viceregal Lima and Pizarro’s Cuzco, it is like flying over the blades of knives. Shoulders and summits, ravines, whole systems of them by the thousand are spread about us and are not exhausted at the hard horizon. It is a sea of solid iron and almost without feature. There may be a blue-eyed lake, like a single, hard sapphire dropped there; an enameled vein of green in a ravine so deep that it might be a mere snick in the bed of the sea; but these are glints, like malice rather than beauty, in a world that is obdurate, upheaving and unconquerable beyond our conception. The sight hurts the whole body and appalls the mind; we are so high above it that we fear we could be whisked off the curve of the world into outer space.

  And then, as we suck at our sweet oxygen tubes like babies—and sag at once if we take them out of our mouths—the gloom lifts and the incredible happens. Suddenly, rising out of the roof, the snow peaks jut up one by one in the higher courts of the sky like cruel kings. There is hierarchy even among rock. We approach them clumsily bumping, we pass slowly between their silence. They stand, withered and distraught, caparisoned with snow. We have been clambering over rock walls for hours, and now, hardly beyond the touch of our wing, we come into these white and royal presences. They look as mad as Lear and as lonely. Slowly they pass—for it is they who seem to move away, not ourselves—with, perhaps, a rag of cloud drawn after them like ermine
whipped away with the fretfulness of old kings. And there behind us, they wait. The horrible thing is that they wait: we have got to return. It is not a place, you feel, as the pilot finds his way between them toward the bare and winding stairway into the valley of Cuzco, where you would choose to hear one of those motors stop. These ravines are solitudes and are—in a word whose meaning we had not realized till now—savage. Now we can say we have seen the savage with our eyes, the landscape of the condor.

  We landed at Cuzco in the dust and sunlight and, taking the tip of those who know how cautiously one must make the change from sea level to the high altitudes of the Andes, I went straight to bed for a couple of hours. Cuzco looked as if it had been bombed. Five years before there had been an earthquake. Builders were still working on the colonial houses where the Spanish copy has been imposed on the great locked stones of the Incas. In the baroque churches the belfries had crumbled, the walls split and the ceilings brought down. In 1950 two thirds of the buildings in a city of eighty thousand had been made uninhabitable. If the people had not gone in thousands to a football match—football at that altitude!—the casualties would have been far greater.

  The Pacific coast is the region of earthquakes, from the tiny quakes that wake you up for a second or two in the small hours of the morning, the sudden rattle in the day that shakes the roofs, the windows and the floors and brings down stones and dust on the mountain roads, to the catastrophe that occurs once or twice in a generation.

  After the Romans, the Spaniards have been the world’s great builders, but the disaster of Cuzco confirmed again that once Spanish rule ended after the Napoleonic wars, there was a general decadence in craftsmanship and care, just as there was also a relapse into political anarchy. Numbers of families in Cuzco go in for the simple trade of making adobe bricks as a sideline; the material is not really strong enough to support the heavy tiled roofs of the houses; poor softwoods, above all the feeble eucalyptus, have replaced the hard, and the tools and skills of both the adobe makers and the stonemasons have declined.