by Tahir Shah
The old launderer jiggled his hands over his chest suggesting large cleavage.
“My wife shouts at me,” he said, ‘she asks why we don’t have a tourist shop like everyone else. She may be angry, but every man in Cusco is jealous of Pedro Valentine. After all,” he continued, “who else can sniff the fragrance of fresh knickers all day long?”
*
Night falls fast in the Andes, and with it comes bitter cold. A boy of five or six waylaid me as I ascended the cobblestone slope towards my hotel, in Plaza Nazarene. His nose was running, his hair matted with dirt, and his cheeks the color of oxblood; their capillaries ruptured by the daily cycle of fire and frost. He tugged at my trouser-leg, bringing me to a halt. Breaking into a tap-dance, he displayed a box of battered postcards. As I scanned them one by one, the boy advertised the extra-low price, one sol for ten. Cusco’s tourist shops peddle a fine selection of cards, all of them promoting the beauties of Peru. But the young salesman’s were from a different stock.
The cards portrayed a lesser-known side of the nation. The first six showed an assortment of hideous mummified bodies. The next was of an Andean medicinal stall, replete with llama-fetuses, then there were a series of ferocious-looking men in ponchos, balancing guinea pigs on their heads. But it was the last card which gripped me. It was a highlight from a textile. I looked at the image closely. It showed a crazed sub-human figure, with a leering expression, claws, crude wings, and a string of decapitated heads running down its back. The picture resembled the one Deiches had shown me. Its caption read El alado hombre del Paracas: the Birdman of Paracas.
I slipped the child a handful of coins and put the cards in my coat pocket. This last might be the clue I’d been waiting for, for the trail to the Birdmen was growing cold. But for now it was time to rest.
*
Sven had had a productive morning. Piled high on an empty café chair were an assortment of his winnings. A bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a green mohair sweater, six paperbacks, two Frisbees, a canvas rucksack, and a cluster of juggling balls. His expensive Walkman was positioned prominently beside the chessboard – like an unobtainable prize at a fairground stall.
“What about a cup of coffee for a poor Slovak?”
Sven had made an art form out of attracting charity. He considered himself to be above using money. The Queen, the Pope and he had one thing in common – none of them carried cash.
I pulled out the postcards I had bought the night before.
“Wonderful,” he said, “mummies and dried llama fetuses.”
“What about this one?” I pointed to the Birdman.
“El alado hombre del Paracas,” he read, rubbing the tip of his nose with a bishop. “Mummified bodies are one thing,” he replied, “but never make light of the winged-men.”
“Who are they?”
The Slovak glanced through me with his gaze.
“Look at that picture,” he said. “What do you see?”
I studied the image: “A wild creature, half-man, half-bird, adorned with severed heads.”
“Is that really what you see?” asked the Slovak. “Look again. Look beyond the obvious.”
Again, I scrutinized the figure, taking in its wide psychotic eyes, its spewing tongue, the individual stitches of embroidery.
“They flew,” I said under my breath. “I’m sure of it...”
Sven splayed his fingers on the table like the legs of a starfish.
“They glided, they soared,” he said, “like flying squirrels.”
“Were the Incas the first to make a gliding wing?”
“We have a saying in Bratislava,” he said: “The wings of an eagle are the arms of a man.” The Slovak twisted his fingers faster and faster until they blurred. “If you believe they flew, then they did.”
At that moment a tall, spindly woman entered the café. A mane of jet-black hair peaked into a crest above her forehead, before cascading down her back. Silver hoops dangled from her ears, reflecting the light as she walked.
As soon as Sven spotted her, he covered his face with his hand and let out a groan.
“Who’s she?”
“It’s Ariadne,” he said.
On his journey through Eastern Europe, across Africa and the New World, the Walkman had encountered all kinds of obstacles. In Cairo he had been accused of dousing a shopkeeper with petrol and setting him alight. Outside Maputo, in Mozambique, he’d been attacked by a pack of wild dogs and in the back-streets of Santiago he had been accosted by a glue-sniffer with a razor blade. Yet, no scourge, it seemed, had been as great as Ariadne.
“God knows why she fell for me,” he said as she sidled over. “She’s followed me for close to a thousand miles. I don’t know how to get rid of her.”
Without a word, Ariadne put her coffee cup on the table and pressed her hand into mine. She must have been in her early forties, about Sven’s age. The dark rings which circled her eyes suggested insomnia. Her long fingernails dug into my wrist.
“Enchanté,” she said in a Parisian voice. “Sven didn’t tell me he had a friend.”
“We played chess,” I said, faltering.
Ariadne scrunched up her eyes to focus on the postcard. Then she ran her tongue precisely across her upper lip, as if licking an envelope.
“The mystery of the Winged Ones...” she said.
“Do you know about them?”
Ariadne’s face twitched, implying that she did.
“That fabric is from the necropolis at Paracas,” she said. “For two thousand years it covered the dead.”
“A dead Birdman?”
“Perhaps.”
Draping her shale-black sheepskin coat over a chair, Ariadne lit a clove cigarette. Sven nudged the ashtray over. Soon the café was thick with pungent smoke.
“I’m looking for traces of the Birdmen,” I said.
Ariadne inhaled deeply.
“Have you been to Taquile?”
“Where’s that?”
“The sacred island in Lake Titicaca.”
Again, she inhaled, holding the smoke in her lungs until her eyes watered with unease. “They say the cloth which is woven there can fly.”
FIVE
A Sacrifice
Clutching to folklore and fragments of fact, I made for Cusco’s railway station and I clambered aboard the train bound for Puno, on the western edge of Lake Titicaca. With my bags stowed on the luggage rack, I took my seat in Inca Class carriage, and stared out at the platform.
A young Quechuan woman was crouched in the shade, a scarlet blanket spread before her like a toreador’s cape. Spread upon it was a pile of dried coca leaves. She adjusted the torn brow of her hat, stroked a hand across her cheek, and waited. All around the island of her shawl, feet were criss-crossing: porters’ dusty lace-ups, backpackers’ thongs, an official’s brogues, a contingent of matching Japanese Reeboks. With an abrupt jolt the train was alive. It came again, jerking me forward and back, as the wheels gnawed into the tracks.
We rolled through the shanty-towns at walking pace. A line of women were selling guinea-pigs, carrots and fruit; their husbands gambling at cards, their children running slipshod through the dirt, like lambs before the dogs. A barber was clipping at a mestizo’s proud moustache; beside him, a tarot reader was deciding someone’s future. An army of peddlers offered pink plastic combs, dusters and brooms. A pair of fighting cocks lurched at each other in the dust, and a class of school children stood to attention, singing.
Soon we had left Cusco behind. The train pushed its way south-east through the green Vilcanota valley, before climbing steeply towards the 14,000 foot La Raya Pass. The air and vegetation were thin and getting thinner.
In the Inca Class carriage a general state of pandemonium prevailed. The guard was trying to revive an old lady who had passed out. A waitress, wearing an ultra-short mini-skirt, was doing her best to deflect the advances of a rowdy Italian. The little girl sitting opposite me spewed her half-digested lunch onto the table between us. Befor
e her mother had a chance to wipe it up, the girl’s younger brother drew a face in the mess. A group of kids pelted the carriage with stones. I buried my face in a guidebook and prayed for Puno to arrive.
As pebbles continued to ricochet off the windows like hailstones, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I looked up. A figure in a black Afghan coat was looming over me.
It was Ariadne.
“Going to Puno?”
I grunted.
Ariadne thrust her duffle bag onto the rack.
“Then we shall be companions,” she said.
Six hours later I had heard every event of Ariadne’s life. She had overlooked no detail. Right from the start, hers had been a troubled tale. Her father had abused her, and her mother had pushed her pram down a flight of stairs for no apparent reason. As a teenager she’d taken up with the drummer of an underground rock group called Retch!, before joining an order of Scottish Rosicrucians. For the last five years she had roamed the world, in search of herself, and in search of a suitable man to father her children.
Unable to bear another word of autobiography, I asked her about the Winged Ones and about the flying textiles of Taquile Island. Ariadne pulled a stick of raven-colored mascara from her pocket book and applied an even coat to her long lashes.
“Be patient and you will discover the answers you are seeking,” she said.
*
As the Inca Class carriage jarred its way across the Altiplano – the high Andean plateau – where only the hardiest men and beasts survive, I watched the sun dip down behind a copse of polylepis trees. We had stopped a dozen times at inconsequential stations. At each, a crowd had been waiting with their goods. All sorts of dishes were held up to the windows – roast mutton served in a twist of newspaper, stuffed peppers, charqui (beef stew), llama jerky, soft cheeses, and thick fermented chicha. Each village had its own speciality. Some sold alpaca gloves, statuettes of Santa Rosa, quenas or llama-hide drums.
Just north of Juliaca, at Pucara, thirty women leapt from the sidings. They were selling unglazed ceramic bulls painted with symbols – a sign of virility and fortitude, brought to the Americas by the Spanish.
As the train pulled into Puno, a great commotion began. Wild dogs charged headlong at the iron wheels, howling like demons. Old mestizos clapped their hands; their womenfolk whistling through broken teeth. Their sons hurled stones. In any other city, or any other country, the train’s arrival might not have excited the raising of a single eyebrow. But, for some inexplicable reason, the locomotive’s entrance into Puno was an event to be celebrated.
On the platform six llamas, adorned with ponchos and rich brocades, had been positioned as a grand guard of honor. Managers from a hundred small hotels mobbed the mass of backpackers, duelling for their custom. Muttering that his name was Ricardo, a fawning hunchbacked man pulled my luggage onto his shoulders, and led me away. I had no idea who he was, or what his hotel was like. I didn’t even know if he had a hotel. I was sure of the one certainty – that back in Cusco, Sven would be toasting his success in ridding himself of Ariadne.
Puno melts into the oatmeal horseshoe of hills like a North African town. Its square-shaped buildings, pocked with dents from stone-throwing boys, couldn’t have changed much since a Spanish count settled it as an outpost more than three centuries ago. Glinting before it, like a step-cut sapphire, hushed and brooding, lies Titicaca. The massive body of iridescent water keeps its secrets safe. One tale says that the Incas tossed an immense gold chain – weighing four thousand pounds – into the waves, to prevent the Spanish from taking it. Another legend says that only he who has seen his likeness reflected in the waters will know true happiness.
I hurried down to the Titicaca’s edge and peered over the side of the long jetty. A swathe of parrot-green algae masked my reflection. Nearby, an armada of leaking boats bobbed about on the water, ready to take tourists to the islands. A short distance off, a traditional canoe made from totoia, a kind of reed, was heading shore-ward. The craft, a scaled-down version of Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki, was being punted through the algae by a boatman.
I had spent the night at Ricardo’s house, which doubled as a “tourist dormitory”. It had just one bed. When no one was staying at his home,
Ricardo slept in the bed. Even though I agreed to pay the going rate, I felt bad about turfing the old man out. The floor was better for his back, he said, blowing his nose on his hand.
Ariadne, who’d shunned the lodgings, had gone off to find a youth hostel. She suggested I was mad to stay in a place lacking a mattress, blankets, running water and heat. The absence of such luxuries certainly did lead to a cold and unpleasant night. But I was more than happy to endure a little discomfort, for it warded Ariadne away.
*
To the right of the jetty, beside a vibrant orange boathouse, stood a great example of brutish Victorian achievement. Her name was Yavari, and she was the oldest ship afloat on Lake Titicaca. Restored in her original livery of green, black and white, she was cushioned in algae. I climbed her narrow gangplank and learned of her remarkable voyage.
Yavari was built in 1862 in Birmingham by the James Watt shipyard. Together with her sister ship, Yapura (now used as a hospital launch by the Peruvian Navy), she was packed into crates in pieces and sent to South America. Once the 1,383 pieces had got as far as the Peruvian coast, they were strapped to mules and lugged over the western Andes. Each mule could carry no more than four hundred pounds; and Yavari weighed two hundred tons. Not surprisingly, the journey took more than six years.
Unperturbed by the lack of available coal in the Andes, Watt had designed a steam engine which would run on llama dung. The iron-hulled queen of Titicaca plied the lake’s dark waters for a century. The only drawback was the enormous quantity of llama excrement needed to power the vessel at such an altitude. Every time she docked, the entire crew had to scurry out to the fields with baskets to scoop up handfuls of llama dung.
On my return, Ricardo asked if I’d seen my reflection in the lake. When I replied that I had not, he stretched an arm above his head, and poked about in the rafters. The sound of bottle being pulled through a nest of rats followed. A moment later he was blowing the dust from a demijohn. Wrenching out the cork with his teeth, he poured a few drops of the chicha over the stone threshold of the house.
“Para los espíritus, for the spirits,” he said.
I told Ricardo that my fortune had been read by a tarot-reader in Cusco.
“Una bruja, a witch, no doubt,” he declared, rubbing his eyes with his thumbs.
“She said that good luck would follow me like the sun.”
Ricardo pulled up a stool and sat. His head tilted towards me, a result of his crooked spine.
“You have no idea,” he said contritely. “This is a very unlucky place indeed. There are bad spirits in my home.”
Ricardo nudged at the sitting-room.
“Why do you think I have so many amulets?” he said.
Now that he mentioned it, there were a great deal of good luck charms, even by Peruvian standards. The windowsill and mantelpiece, the bookshelf, door-frame, and a dozen niches around the room, were cluttered with the trinkets.
“As a young man I was athletic,” he said. “Local girls fought over me, and my friends called me el suertudo, the lucky one.”
Holding the demijohn to his lips, Ricardo took a swig.
“I was married to the most beautiful woman in Puno,” he said. “Her eyes shone like black diamonds, her skin was tinted like the dawn. We moved into this house, had a pair of sons, good health, and all the luck in the world.”
Ricardo swigged at the bottle a second time. He craned his neck up to look me in the eye. He swigged again.
“What went wrong?” I asked.
“The fortune drained away,” said the hunchback. “Like water swirling from a bath. My wife drowned in the lake, then my boys gave in to fever. Then this!”
Ricardo thumped his back with his fist.
“All of us cu
rsed... cursed by the spirits hidden in these walls.”
“Why don’t you pack up and leave?”
Again, Ricardo swigged at chicha.
“Hah!” he roared. “The spirits... they would hunt me down, just as they hunt any man who steps across the threshold. No one can ever escape them!”
I’m not naturally superstitious, but the prospect of being pursued by my host’s spirits was unsavory. Given the circumstances, I wondered why he invited strangers to stay.
Ricardo crossed the room and foraged in a niche beside the wardrobe. He removed a hand-sized ceramic figurine: it was of a short man, his mouth open with laughter, his colorful costume dangling with belongings.
“Ekeko,” he said, passing it to me. “The god of fortune.”
I had read about Ekeko. Long ago he had been an Aymara deity, carved from stone, celebrated for bringing good harvests. With the colonial influence, he became white-skinned and moustachioed, and was eventually made from clay. Ekeko must never be sold. But when he’s given by one to another, the receiver is blessed with immeasurable fortune.
Ricardo drained the demijohn of chicha, and burped.
“Amigo,” he said gently, “you seem like a good man. You have kind eyes.”
I began to thank him, but he raised a finger to stop me.
“Take this Ekeko,” he said. “Keep him warm and dry, and,” Ricardo paused to burp again, “... and he’ll bring you more happiness than you have ever known.”
*
Next morning, after a second night in Ricardo’s bed, I plucked the bare necessities from my bags and headed down to the jetty. The time had come to search for the flying textiles of Taquile. I strolled through the market en route to the lake.
A little girl was hopping between the crates of guinea pigs; her younger sister dancing after on tiptoes. The rows of Aymara women were preening their stalls, dusting off the merchandize. Chinese-made Barbie dolls and chewing-gum from Vietnam, cakes of prune-colored laundry soap and caps for toy guns, make-up mirrors, light-bulbs, batteries and chain. But the pride of place on every groundsheet stall was reserved for fuchsia-colored fizzy drinks. Peruvians old and young have a great fondness for gaseosas, drinks with so much synthetic dye and carbonation that one sip and your mouth goes numb. I later heard of a street-side dentist who used the beverage as a local anaesthetic when he was pulling out teeth.