by Tahir Shah
The equipment was packed on to the rafts and wrapped twice in polythene. Then they were launched, along with the antique Zodiac, and we set off back to Panataua.
The pinnacles might have been a disappointment but, as I saw it, there is nothing like testing equipment and men. As my grandfather would always say: “Time spent on reconnaissance is seldom wasted.”
The Zodiac took in water the moment it was eased into the raging current. The balsa rafts fared much better: unlike the rubber boat, floating came naturally to them. Their other great advantage was their strength: they could be hauled effortlessly over the sharpest rocks.
It took only two days to retrace our route down the Inchipata. The farmers were thrilled at the prospect of returning to their homes. I longed to get to Panataua so I could talk Héctor into setting out with us. If the porters from his village were the best around, I had no idea how we would ever transport our gear on a larger scale journey.
For the moment the greatest concern was Richard. He lay on one of the rafts, outstretched and delirious, trembling with fever. At first I thought he was putting it on, that it was a bizarre act, perhaps to pull out of the main expedition. But as time wore on, I began to wonder if he was genuinely ill. The Richard Fowler we all knew and endured would have torn your head off for making fun of his past. But now he put up with the porters’ taunts, and even allowed Roberto to stroke his thighs — until I ordered the young cook to move away. It seemed unfair to allow him to caress a man incapable of defending himself.
At Panataua, the porters lined up to be paid. They looked like a concert party about to put on a performance, rather than serious jungle porters. I counted out a wad of notes for each and forced myself to shake their hands.
“Nunca encontrarás Paititi, you will never find Paititi,” said Máximo, when his turn came.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because you do not have Jesus in your heart.”
I thanked him for his observation and handed him his money. Rogerio was next. He asked me if he and the other men could be given a Pot Noodle as a bonus. I said that none of them deserved a bonus but, as a gesture of goodwill, they would each be presented with one of the tasty dehydrated meals. They thanked me.
“You know, they are not to fill our stomachs,” said Máximo darkly, “son para satisfacer a nuestras mujeres, they are to satisfy our wives.”
It took me a moment to make the connection. He had referred to the supposed aphrodisiacal properties of the white plastic pots.
When the men had been given their Pot Noodles, we received word from Héctor that we should come to his shack. I didn’t know what to do with all the gear, so I coaxed the farmers to ferry it to his part of the village as their gesture of goodwill. Héctor was standing under a wayuru tree, waiting for us. It was good to see him again. He was smiling, his mouth framed with white beard, a baseball cap pulled down tight on his head. “I see that you survived the jokers,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“The farm boys, son débiles como los niños, they’re as weak as children.”
“Why didn’t you warn me?”
The old man laughed ominously. “If you really want to find Paititi,” he replied, “you have to learn how to choose a team. Without the right people you will never succeed.”
Héctor owned two modest wooden shacks. The one on the right was used for cooking and eating; there was an antechamber filled with general bric-á-brac and week-old chicks. The other building was larger. It consisted of a small sitting area open to the elements, a storeroom, and a room in which Héctor, his wife, daughter and son slept. The shacks were surrounded by a mud garden. The arrangement was as primitive as one could imagine. Héctor had come from the big city of Arequipa eighteen years before, but had not bothered to build a more permanent home. There was no running water, no lavatory or stove and, of course, no electricity. The family relied on candlelight, cooked on an open fire and washed at the stream like everyone else in the village.
The old man took one look at Richard, who was barely able to stand, and shook his head. “You must all stay here with us,” he said. “This man is in a bad condition, and he should not be moved.”
“He’s used to a diet of hallucinogens,” I responded, “but he can’t get them. So he’s getting weaker and weaker.”
El Maestro helped the old soldier to lie down on a bench in the shade. “There is only one thing that can save him,” he said, “el amor de Jesús, the love of Jesus.”
With that, Héctor ushered us in to eat. His wife, Doris, was cooking a meal in the cramped kitchen. She was a short woman, hunched from years of stooping at the hearth, her head crowned with dull gray hair, her childlike eyes reflecting the flames.
We told Héctor about the pinnacles, the porters, and what we had learned. I declared that the journey had been a waste of time.
“No, it certainly was not,” said Héctor. “It was the beginning of your preparation.”
We sat at the rough table and held hands in prayer. The old man’s son, Paolo, said grace. He was about twelve, with the face of an angel, a complexion so delicate that we all gazed at it. The food was brought in by Mariela, the teenage daughter we had met at the chacra. There were wide enamel bowls filled with creamy maize porridge, and boiled yuca on a bed of rice.
We ate in silence, and when the meal was over, Héctor thanked Jesus on behalf of us all for providing the food. At first I felt I ought to confess my aversion to missionaries. Then I realized Héctor might find it necessary to convert me. I asked the Swedes what to do. They talked animatedly in Swedish for a minute or two.
“Don’t confess anything,” they said. “It’ll blow our cover.”
So we all agreed to endure the message of Adventism as best we could. After lunch Doris spoon-fed Richard a bowl of chicken broth. His eyes had rolled up in an alarming way. I thought he might die. Héctor was cordial, but wouldn’t approach the sick soldier. He disliked even looking at him. “He is filled with bitterness, with evil,” he declared, slapping his hands together. “Only a diet of prayer can return his health. Este hombre le ha dado la espalda a Dios, this man has turned his back on God.”
“He’s here to protect us,” I said, in a moment of enthusiasm.
Héctor peered down at the outstretched figure, regarding him with absolute loathing. “My friend,” he said, “this man here could not protect anyone from anything. But let us pray for a miracle.”
We held hands and formed a circle around Richard: Héctor, Doris, Paolo and Mariela, Leon and David, Marco, Boris and myself. It was as if we were attempting to will life into the body of a dead man. Héctor led the prayers, beseeching Jesus to give Richard another chance.
“He will be born again!” he cried. “And will learn to walk and talk, and will be your child. He will love you, oh, Jesus, he will be your son.”
The film crew and I exchanged troubled glances. We were all concerned for our host. He was a religious maniac, but at the same time he was our best hope of finding the ruins.
That evening we sat on home-made benches on Héctor’s veranda. The candle wicks were long, their flames fanned by a gentle breeze from the west. Richard hadn’t moved since we had arrived at the shack. He was still lying on the bench, his military clothing soaked with sweat. From time to time he would stir, ranting as if he was looking death in the eye.
Héctor thrived in the darkness, when the candles were burning, projecting shadows across the walls like phantoms. He sat back, rubbed his beard and conjured his own world with words: “Tienes que venir con el espíritu limpio, you have to come with a clean spirit,” he said softly. “It must be like a child who has not lost his innocence. To gain that purity you must cleanse your soul.”
“But how do we find Paititi?” I asked.
“I told you,” he said. “The only way to find it is not to look for it at all. Only a man who has no greed, no avarice, can succeed. When you find Paititi you can take nothing from it. Touch anything at all
and you will go blind.” Héctor paused, picked up his tattered Bible, and pressed the soft leather cover to his lips in a kiss. “If you do find Paititi,” he continued, “you will have to repay the earth. How do you do that? Well, if you find a few ruins you will have to kill something small, a dog, perhaps. But if the ruins are great, you will have to kill something far larger.” Again Héctor paused, but this time he looked at me through the ocher light. “Si las ruinas son grandiosas, if the ruins are great,” he repeated, “tendrás que matar a un hombre, you will have to kill a man.”
Héctor walked the tightrope between lunacy and genius. Like everyone else, I was drawn in, willing to suspend judgment, for the Maestro mesmerized his audience, daring them to believe.
Before we knew it a week had passed, each day filled with a rigid routine of prayer, and sermons on how one might find Paititi. It felt as if we were growing roots, planting ourselves on the mud floor of Héctor’s home. Richard barely moved. He grew increasingly frail, and swore in a whisper at anyone who spoke to him. An attractive young nurse came from the village to examine him. In more usual circumstances, the veteran would have been all over her, but he was broken.
“What’s the matter with him?” I asked her.
“No es más que un resfrío, it’s nothing but a cold,” she said. “Please try to make sure he washes. He smells very bad!”
Before she left, the nurse inquired about the strong medicine I had brought from my home country.
“The painkillers?”
“No, Señor,” she said, holding a hand over her mouth as if she was about to utter an obscenity. “Los afrodisíacos, the aphrodisiacs.”
I squinted in confusion, then remembered the potent medication.
“Women all over the village are asking me for the medicine,” she said. “They have heard it makes a man fiery, passionate.”
I handed her a Pot Noodle. “It’s a special new kind of drug from Europe,” I said. “You take it orally.”
Every day Héctor’s harangues grew longer, and wilder, and every day I sensed that we were farther from reaching our goal, Paititi. The scruff of white beard that hid his mouth and quivered when he spoke gave our host an aura of sophistication. And when he spoke, those around him listened. You couldn’t help yourself. You were drawn in, like a swarm of insects desperate to touch a flame on a tropical night. Héctor would speak of veiled evil on a Biblical scale, hinting of curses and brujería and ferocious, diabolical forces lurking between the trees, and in the mists of the waterfalls.
One night, he claimed to have seen a UFO. He said it wasn’t a “normal” extraterrestrial, but was created by sorcerers upriver: the very same place to which we were planning to travel.
“Era una bola de luz, it was a ball of light,” he said, “a sphere burning brilliantly like phosphorus. It glided through the sky, and down, down, down over the trees. Then, when it reached the river, it dived into the water.”
“Weren’t you fearful?” I asked.
“No,” El Maestro replied stolidly, “we had no fear, because we have Jesus.”
On the eighth day Héctor had a visitor, a man we had not met before. He was wearing a simple uniform, part military, part civilian, and was called Señor Franco. He was tall and had an uninteresting face; the kind of man your eyes would not pick out in a crowd. He walked with a dead straight back and chewed the corner of his mouth between sentences. The frosty reception put on by Héctor and his family indicated their feelings for him. It turned out that he worked for the government and he had not come to speak to Héctor but to us.
“If you go to look for Paititi,” he said, in a clear, practised voice, “we will have you arrested and incarcerated.”
“Paititi? What’s Paititi?” I asked flippantly.
“You heard what I said,” he riposted. “I am waiting for you. I am watching you.”
When he was gone, Héctor warned us of the authorities. “There is a layer of bad men plundering our country’s wealth,” he said. “It’s big business, the business of a few.”
“Is Señor Franco one of them?”
“No, no, he’s low down in the chain of command,” Héctor replied. “He’s employed by the government, but is really working for the oil company.”
A second week slipped by and, with each day, it was as if our roots anchored us a little more firmly to Héctor’s shack. He was now saying there was no point in leaving for the lost city before the next year. He had crops to plant, and money to repay. Again and again he declared that we were still not pure, our souls were not yet cleansed.
“Will we ever be ready to search for the ruins of the Incas?” I shouted in despair.
“Quizás no, perhaps not,” was his reply.
Meanwhile, Richard grew ever weaker. The villagers would troop m from time to time and look at him slouched in his camouflage hammock. Some would stretch out their arms and poke him, as if jabbing a strange animal to see if it was alive. They all had the same diagnosis: that the Vietnam veteran had descended into Hell and turned his back on Jesus. They were praying for his soul, they said coyly.
But then, one morning, Richard was standing up outside the house. We rushed over. He was smiling. We applauded. No one had seen him smiling in a very long time.
“I’m better,” he said angrily.
Héctor praised Jesus for the miracle.
We must have been at the house too long, for we prayed to the Lord and were happy to do so.
“What’s wrong with you?” Richard snapped at me. “You gone all fuckin’ religious or something?”
It was a great moment. The soldier was back to his old self. We were a team again. I went up and hugged him. “It’s good to have you back,” I said.
Yeah, well, get me some chow, will ya?”
Doris piled a plate high with roasted yuca and handed it to Richard as if her prodigal son had returned. Then, after the meal, we sat in the sunshine and Richard told tales of the wild times of his youth.
David was the one to stir the memories from him. “What about Vietnam?” he said.
To us it was a single word, the name of a place, but to Richard it was a word whose intensity he had never found elsewhere. Like so many veterans, he relived it in his mind every day.
“Vietnam?” said Richard, drawing deep on his Marlboro. “I’ll tell you about Vietnam. Sure it was ugly, it was fucking obscene. But I had a ball down there. I’d be camped out in the jungle, inserted behind enemy lines and all that shit you see in the movies. If I got bored, and you did get bored, I could call in a fuckin’ airstrike. There I was, a kid of nineteen, calling in a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar airstrike. It blew your mind.”
“What about the killing?”
“Yeah, there was killing and death and plenty of it,” said Richard. “They called our platoon the Widow Makers, and there was a reason for it. When you were new what they’d do was to take you out on a trail with an experienced guy. All your life you’re taught that killing is wrong, and all that Christian shit. But now you’re out there, trained to do the shit. It’s like cowboys and Indians when you were a kid. You’re with these guys and they set you up. They put you in the bushes and you’re sitting there watching, waiting. All of a sudden you see part of a guy and he’s lookin” around and he’s coming along... and now you’re getting ready to kill him. He could have a wife but you don’t think about that kind of shit. You got your weapon on automatic “cos you’re new to the game. You raise it up and lock on to the body. You let out a burst... Brrrrr! Then you take off, running like a madman up the trail.
“After a while, when you’re more experienced, you get cool at it, and you can kill with one or two rounds. Then you got people saying to you, “Way to go, man! You rock! You finally got yourself a gook!” You get a case of beer and they’re shaking your hand and you get this kinda sick fucking feeling. To do your job is one thing, but all of a sudden you’ve crossed the line with these guys and you’re one of them. You’ve been initiated.”
&nb
sp; Richard’s illness had destabilized us all. I think it was because we feared he might kill us in the night. That evening, as I struggled to sleep, I thanked Jesus for bringing him back to us intact.
TEN
PORTERS FOR DELICATE INSTRUMENTS
Entrust surveying instruments and fragile articles to some respectable old savage, whose infirmities compel him to walk steadily. He will be delighted at the prospect of picking up a living by such easy service.
The Art of Travel
Life at Héctor’s shack continued as a routine of prayer, sleep and mental preparation. Days drifted by and, as they did so, I felt myself losing grasp of the expedition. Sometimes it seemed as though Héctor had us there like captive animals in a strange menagerie. We would listen to his stories, his warnings of what lay upriver. It was crazed talk but it relieved the boredom.
The routine began with hymns. They were sung at five each morning, usually led by Paolo, whose voice had not yet broken. Then we would saunter off into the woods and wash down by the stream. After that, Doris would provide some rice and roasted chicken for breakfast. Then the harangues would begin. Héctor could sit at the kitchen table for six hours or more. With narrowed eyes and flailing arms, he conjured a realm of terrifying danger.
“We will pass through a vast chasm filled with rapids,” he said one morning. “We will know it because the walls will be so steep that merely looking upon them will send shocks of electricity pulsing down our spines. After that will come three more pongos, great rapids. It will be impossible to use boats or rafts. You have no idea how hard it will be!”
Héctor cut himself short. He was about to continue, but for some reason he sat in silence, slid his fingertips over each other and prayed to Jesus. Doris looked on from the kitchen area. “Espíritu Santo” she whispered, “the sacred spirit.”
“Is there a problem?” I asked.