The aspect of Cuzco is perfectly Castilian, in the austerity of its arid mountain setting and its bare brown tilled fields, which are marked by the poplars the Spaniards brought from the dusty roads of Castile. Pizarro entered Cuzco in 1533. He had marched his paltry army of 177 men up from the coast to conquer an empire and capture Atahualpa, its ruler. The Spanish genius is the gambler’s. Pizarro, remembering the boldness of Cortés in Mexico, got his blow in first and took the Inca by bloody stratagem; and then, after a terrible march over the Andes, arrived in Cuzco, the capital of the kingdom. He had fought his way there, but he had murdered Atahualpa by then and arrived a conqueror.
Pizarro came to Cuzco in November, when all is brown and the air is clean and cold under a changeless sky and when a white cloud will stand still like a piece of sculpture; and the landscape must have reminded the conqueror of the land he had known in his youth. Spanish and yet not Spanish. For he saw the heavy, low-standing Inca temples and houses, built of huge blocks of stone, the temples shining with walls of gold and silver inside.
Those implacable walls of the Incas, beautiful in their mortarless, ingenious interlocking, became foundations on which the Spanish manors and cloisters, the Spanish arcades and green and brown balconies, the rich Spanish churches, have been built. Here and there, the religious symbols of the Incas are embossed on a building; the cabalistic sign leaps like a serpent close to the Spanish coat of arms or the richly ornamented doorway.
We climb, losing our breath in that fine air, giddy with the height, up streets cut in steps, looking into courtyards that might be in Spanish Toledo, though here is greater misery. We pass the tailors at their sewing machines or dressmaker’s models (for male tailors are as numerous as barbers). But at the top of the street we do not hear the Spanish goat bells; instead there is a group of long-necked llamas heavy with their wool, looking at us de haut en bas with a disdain one had never noticed in duchesses. The Inca stone blocks are a timeless and simple geometry, one of the fundamental inventions of the human race. What hands first moved them? We see their silvery bloom in the streets of Cuzco, in the fortress of Sacsahuaman, and in their unanswering mystery at Machu Picchu. Old explorers of the Andes regret that Hiram Bingham’s almost impassable mule track from Machu Picchu has now been replaced by a light railway which wanders down the gorges and connects the Indian villages, and that vulgar tourists can get to a lost city that is lost no more. But is Pompeii the worse for being visited?
You journey to Machu Picchu—some fifty miles north of Cuzco—by rail, through high and flowering valleys of broom. Then the mountains close in, the corridors of the gorges begin. You shiver at ten thousand feet and stare at the sky for a sight of the condor that never comes; you drop down into the dripping tropical forest that clots the air. The mountains shut you in. The train whistle sends echoes bounding from wall to wall; outside their huts, the Indians stand, dirty, bedraggled, the last hopeless heirs of the race, or trot in panic on their donkeys along the track in front of the train. You follow the “river with three names,” the Urubamba, that storms over its boulders for tens of miles. You see the rope bridges spanning it; and then, when the gorge divides and you are at the bottom of the mountain hole, a furry cone of rock shoots upward for a couple of thousand feet. On the wall opposite, out of sight from below, is the lost city, the condor’s nest. There, terraced on the summit, with its altars open to the sky, its ruined windows turned for the rising and setting sun, its worshipers gone, is Machu Picchu.
This is one of the supreme sights of the Andes and one of the unsurpassed archaeological finds and mysteries of South America. Not even a swarm of tourists could take from the height and the surrounding mountain mass their overpowering communication of solitude. The silence belongs to the earth and the rock, and the human voice and person are trivial beside it. We know, in any case, that one step beyond the precincts and we could be lost, starved and infallibly dying. The most insensitive of us is forced to see here that he has come to an end, that a town not only can die but that all memory and knowledge of it can pass out of mind.
Machu Picchu was discovered in 1911 by Hiram Bingham, the American archaeologist. He climbed the precipice and found the ruins buried in undergrowth. At first they were thought to be purely Inca, but then pottery was found which suggested at least part of the town had been built in pre-Inca times. There is no tradition to say how the town came there or why it was abandoned, yet it can have been no more than four hundred years ago that one of the Inca princes fled there with his nobles from Pizarro. A very large number of female skeletons have been found and some have thought the prince fled there with the Virgins of the Sun. The huge stones of the walls, the cells, the temples and the altars and places for observing the rising and setting of the Sun God stand smooth and silvered and perplexing. Did the Spaniards not know of the place? Did they never march up the gorge? And why did the town die? Did the inhabitants perish of some plague? Did they simply die out, from hunger or old age ? One pictures, as one stands there, the last aging handful and then the last human being of all among the dead. Yet it may not have been like that. The people may have gone down to the jungle of Peru; they may have been wiped out in war.
Pre-Inca pottery has been found in Machu Picchu. Legend overlaps legend, as one master race with its new propaganda overlays another in Indian history. On the topmost stone of Machu Picchu we see with awe “the stone that measures the sun.” First it is the moon who sends her child, the sun, in the form of a jaguar to beget a child with an Indian woman and create the race. Centuries pass and then it is Viracocha, the god who comes out of Lake Titicaca to create heaven, earth and men, but forgets to create light. In darkness men destroy each other and Viracocha turns them to stone. Then, trying again, he creates Manco and Ocllo, son and mother or brother and sister, to redeem the fallen world and to create a civilization of which perhaps the triumphant Incas before Pizarro were the descendants. The scholars dispute, the archaeologists dig, there is no written tradition. We can only know that the Indians of today, living on a little maize and sometimes a bit of dried guinea-pig meat, are worse off than the Indians of those times who discovered and grew the potato and made maize flour, bread, drink and honey. They used the seed, the leaves and the roots of the aloe. From the roots they made soap and, even now, you see the Indian women beating their washing with the aloe leaves so that the soapy pulp froths out. Even now you find the hole in the root where the sap gathers and ferments and from which comes the liquid they boil or used to boil for treating their black hair. Their dyes come from plants, their wool from the llamas. A constant sight on these roads is of women trotting along with their distaffs, frantically spinning their wool as they go.
Death is familiar to the Indian: the Incas—as you can see in the wonderful museum at Lima—mummified their dead and buried them in a sitting posture, binding the bodies in graveclothes that are now spidery with age. From its cobweb of clothing the shrunken face, oddly Hindu in appearance, gazes back at us with cynical intensity. The dead person’s spirit placated by being buried with his favorite things does no ill to survivors. The Jívaro Indians of the Amazon shrink heads. In the fields you sometimes see a ring of men and women squatting in the evening outside some village. It is a wake. They are eating the dead person’s favorite dishes and soon they will sing and, as the chicha works on them, they will dance and get drunk. In a year’s time they will mark the anniversary of the dead person to fend off any ill intent of his spirit.
I saw the priest—a hearty Irish-American from Chicago—rapidly baptizing the newborn babies in the church on the plain outside Lake Titicaca. The mothers knelt on the floor afterward, took their babies that looked like little skinned rabbits, bound them into their shawls, slung them onto their backs with the swift skill of a lifetime, and trotted off to the market.
“Most of them die very soon,” said the priest, “but if the babies are not baptized before they die the parents think their spirits will return in the form of hail and destr
oy the crops. And now,” he said, “I’ve got to bless all those clothes, the clothes of the dead, so as to free them from evil spirits until the next anniversary.”
“As far as I can figure it out,” said the man from Chicago, “their life is a system of elaborate insurance policies.”
The next day I was flying from Cuzco, over the desert toward La Paz and the Bolivian mines; I was done with the old Spanish corner of the continent.
Bolivia
The most dramatic and frightening of all South American experiences is Bolivia. It is hardly a country; it exists for scarcely any reason except the world demand for tin. But it is an unforgettable spectacle; a close-up of the crust of the moon, a visitation from Tibet, yet as marshy as the wastes of Ireland’s Connemara with its decaying thatched huts. The whirlwinds travel like specters over unbroken tableland and the jagged snow peaks stand up all round. Not all Bolivia is like this; there is jungle beyond the Andes and there are those distant, lower towns where life is kind and the Indians smile and laugh at last. There is sport: hunting and skiing.
For myself Brazil and Bolivia are the two major experiences of the continent: in the former you are sane; in the latter, the hair stands on end and you are mad. The floor level is fourteen thousand feet and in that thin air it takes a two-mile runway to get an airplane off the ground. A stoical llama, scratching his belly with his hind leg, greets you at the highest commercial airport in the world and you drive over a rough flint road into the cold inferno of La Paz; an inferno because you descend by the terraces of a Dantesque hell which is fifteen hundred feet deep, with the snow peaks standing pitilessly round it as tawny and blue as iron.
You come at last to the main square where two Mongolian sentries stand with fixed bayonets guarding a lamppost. It is the sacred lamppost where the previous president was hanged. There are bullet marks spattered up the walls of the Ministry of War. The Bolivian revolution was serious. We are in an active Indo-America, over 80 percent Indian or mestizo, armed, taciturn, ruthless, cunning, starved.
You cannot say that Bolivia really lives: say rather it survives as stone survives, as rock splits but still, fantastically, stands. Bolivia is pure geology. The inhuman jungle poisons but entrances; the tableland and the mountain passes frighten but have an inhuman spell of their own. The roads vanish into wilderness tracks of whitened rocks that have been withered like ghosts, for even rocks can die and turn into whorled specters in their mindless cemeteries. At this height much of what you call yourself dies out with a snap, like that; but what survives becomes intensed and overexcited.
Something (the least observant person can see at once) has happened lately in La Paz—even if he did not see the anti-Communist posters on the walls, hear the countercry for the release of Communist prisoners, or the blare of the radio of the national revolution. You can tell it at night by the homeless dogs that gather on the main avenue and in other streets; large watchdogs, most of them, from the large new villas of the expropriated landowners and mine owners who have fled. For in 1952 there was revolution—not the short, usual South American coup d’état—but the real thing coming up grimly from the mines. Three thousand people were killed in La Paz. The new government armed the miners as a militia—the arms were said to have come from Perón. Communists? No. Nazis? No. Though German Nazism was strong in Bolivia. Nationalism is the strongest popular force in South America, and the first emergence of the masses is starting a new long reign of demands; but, of course, it pays to frighten advanced countries by pretending to be Communist.
Foreign experts tell Bolivians to move the scanty population off the highlands, or altiplano, to the tropical regions where they can develop farming. But the people will not go down. The terrible Chaco war with Paraguay in the 1930s frightened the people of the tableland. They died in thousands in the tropics. So the villas of the millionaire mine owners are rented, the hunting prints hang in the empty houses of the haciendas; and in La Paz the Point Four official and the United Nations research workers, the economists and martyred diplomats of all the nations scream with claustrophobia. And the homeless dogs camp at night in the avenues.
The exchange makes tourists rich and if they cannot buy as good silver in La Paz as in Peru, it is far cheaper. The best company in La Paz are the travelers, gamblers and those adventurers who have found a mine. Here are the mad Nazi Germans, the mad English, the mad Americans; the mad Spaniard from Franco’s Russian Brigade arguing his head off with the liberal Spaniard from Córdoba, and the Italian chess player pleading for peace and civilization. The trigger-happy Bolivians get rowdy on whiskey at the nightclubs, while the Indians crawl on their hands and knees outside, peeping in at the people who have the energy to dance and the money to spend for girls.
In La Paz the Indians dress in brilliant clothes. The women stride in gay petticoats—orange and pink and green—and wear hard derby hats, and carry their babies on their backs. The shops are packed with their woven blankets, their mule bags and purses, their ponchos and huge piles of gaudy dresses. In the market of La Paz you see that they have a passion for clothes and fine things. The women are as gay as parrots in their plumage. The Aymara—the Indians of Bolivia—are a genial race, reveling in their fiestas and their jokes. Here, in La Paz, for the first time, I saw an Indian laugh: saw a woman bent double carrying a bed on her back; she passed a man bent double under a load of boards and, as she passed, she gave him a push that sent him twirling helplessly round under his top-heavy load until, as he spun back, he managed to give her a push too. Tottering helplessly, these two cheerful pack animals reeled with laughter.
There are shops where the Indians make the white top hats and the stiff glass-embroidered waistcoats of linen which they wear for the wild, long-legged glide of the dances at the fiesta of Cochabamba; the hats make these short people suddenly tall and witchlike. The dancers rent the green and purple horned heads of the devil dancers with glass set in the cheeks. There is glass, too, in the donkey mask with its red lips salivating, and in the satirical image of the Spanish don that goes back to the Conquest—the absurd, dandyish little head with silver mustaches and a smug little mirror in the chin.
The Indian of La Paz is gorgeous. He is only a few hours from Lake Titicaca, the cradle of his race. Out of that wide stretch of water came the god who created the children of the sun. Their descendants sail their long canoes made of rushes, with straw sails. (The trout of Titicaca is the best food in Bolivia; they are the largest I have seen. The imported food is terrible.)
To what extent are the Andean Indians Christians and Catholics? They are baptized by the priest; they send for him when they are dying. They are completely Catholic, for they were forcibly but easily converted by the Spaniards. Their own religion had been authoritarian, there were doctrinal similarities. The Inca priests maintained a confessional. The Indian is a passive character and the breaking up of his communal life destroyed the only organized force that could have kept his pagan faith alive. The Church stood between the Spanish adventurers and the Indians; the Church abhorred the Indians’ destruction, yet dreaded his heresy and miscegenation. The Jesuits segregated the Indians in communities run by the Order. The system broke down; human nature, released for new freedoms and new evils in this new world, was too strong for priest and Church.
By the time the traveler has got to Chile, least Spanish of the republics, the churches are less interesting, the sense of religion is less pervasive; and except for the Araucanians in southern Chile, there are no Indians.
Chile
You take off from La Paz for the thousand-mile flight south to Santiago, the capital of Chile. The moment you have flown off the tableland of Bolivia—over the Chilean nitrate desert, over the largest copper mine in the world, lost in its vast pitiless amphitheater of rock and sand—the plane turns toward the kinder sun of the subtropics and you are in a different world.
Once again you see how irreconcilably the South American states differ. Peru is courtly; Bolivia is barbaric. In Chile th
e Spanish spirit has been diluted: central Chile has the classical grace of the Mediterranean; southern Chile of the lakes, with its cool and rainy climate and its blossoms hung against the snow mountains, suggests a Japanese print, or again, because of its plantations of firs, some part of Germany or Scandinavia; in the extreme south the cold and harshness of the uninhabitable country are Antarctic.
I have heard the Chileans called the English of South America. There is a long tradition of English settlement there, and a strong link with the British navy. I have also heard the Chilean described as frank, uncouth, masterful, ill-mannered and efficient. He has no equal in South America as a soldier and is, in the sense that the Northern races understand this, a strong character. That is, a man of action, more honest, less sensitive than is general among Latins; less subtle, and with less of that “delicacy” which is one of the fundamental qualities of the South American, and that marks him off from the Northerner in the New World or the Old. In Peru and Bolivia, and even in Ecuador, the Spanish stock is being Indianized; but in Chile, the Araucanian Indian is being Europeanized. But if we left the primitive in Bolivia for something that is nearer the modern world in spirit, the modern world of Chile is, to be frank, circa 1900. The Chilean has the island temperament. He looks out from the pretty harbor restaurants of Valparaíso—the food in Chile is the best in South America—and sees the Japanese merchant vessels lying there. This long narrow country, shut off in a narrow strip 2600 miles long and, on the average, 110 miles wide between the Andes and the South Pacific, is far away from the rest of the world.
And there are economic reasons for Chile’s isolation. The opening of the Panama Canal cut down the voyages round the Horn. This took away the trade of Valparaíso, where every sailor in the world once called. The manufacture of synthetic nitrates has eaten into the wealth of the nitrate deserts, the copper market has dropped. Less than a quarter of the land in Chile is arable. There are fine horses and cattle but the country cannot keep itself in beef.
At Home and Abroad Page 4