With this image of the ancestral territories of the Incas engraved in my mind, I returned by the asphalt road to the village, collected my belongings and hopped on the bus headed for Cusco. From Pisac it’s only a 33 kilometre ride, but there are many archaeological sites along this route too. The Sacred Valley surely constituted the main artery of the Inca heartland, and it continues to do so for an indigenous population that has lived through the reign of several successive and often oppressive domestic rulers. Subsequently they acquiesced to the certainly no less oppressive Spanish crown and its Viceroy, to finally become citizens of the modern Republic of Peru. Still, life on the fringes of the Sacred Valley remains traditional and often convey timeless images:
Early morning. A deeply tanned Indian woman on her way to the market leads a fully loaded llama down a hillside. Her facial features are prematurely aged from relentless exposure to the elements. She’s dressed in coloured skirts, a deep green poncho flung around her neck, while carrying an enormous load of merchandise wrapped in a textile tarp on her back. On her head sits a solid hat high as a chimney. Walking the steep gradients, she puffs on a short pipe filled with tobacco while her adolescent grandson, leading the way, entertains her with Andean airs from his reed flute.
And the sun also rises over purple mountains.
17Today the trains for Machu Picchu supposedly no longer depart from the city centre but from some location on its surrounding ridge, and so this kind of railway sluicing in Cusco is now another part of its history.
The ultimate ascension
Climbing the Wayna Picchu had been part of a birthday gift I had promised myself, to prove that I was still capable of making such an effort without actually suffering a heart attack or a stroke while doing so. Truth to tell I never expected to embark upon a similar adventure again. But Destiny, again, had other ideas on my behalf. Very recently I was thus talked into hiking the world’s allegedly largest natural pyramid, the so-called Cerro Tusa. This remarkable mountain lies within sight from the village Venecia in the Colombian province of Antioquia, and not only from there, but allegedly from all angles, has the shape of a pyramid. The only two explanations I have as to why I accepted the challenge to mount it was that I didn’t want to disappoint my dear travel companion, and that I thought that the only existing path that could take one there, though strenuous enough, would zig-zag its way from the base to the top. At the beginning this was actually quite true.
The moped taxi, having brought us outside the village to the foot of the mountain, had stopped next to a brook beneath a cow pasture. This was our point of departure on foot. The advantage of having a guide with us at this point was that we would never even have found the beginning of the path leading up the mountain, since to get there one has to cross a number of fenced-in cattle fields which didn’t have any beaten tracks. In addition, I don’t think I would have dared to take on Colombian bulls on my own. But since our guide seemed to trust their docility we lined up behind him, occasionally crawling under electric fences as the terrain gained altitude, revealing more and more of its spectacular topography. After about half an hour’s walk, we latched the last gate behind us and embarked on the path that would take us to the top. Eventually… because here the disadvantage of having the guide with us began to show. It only took me about another half-hour, coinciding with the path turning from a steep zig-zag pattern into a straight line pointing towards the sky in a 75-degree angle, to realise that though the project would have been marvelously appropriate for trained mountaineers, it presented us with the challenge of a lifetime — and one about to run out for good! Had we been alone on the trail, I most certainly would have suggested to Asíle that we turn around and try to make it back to the village as soon as possible. But our guide, mountain-fit and quite used to doing this often, would have nothing of the sort and kept spurring us on. There was nothing we could do to talk him out of it. Besides the whole thing had started to become a matter of prestige — always dangerous, sometimes fatal, when it comes to proving something in the face of sublimely indifferent nature.
But there we were. Luckily for us the hot afternoon sun sometimes had the idea of hiding behind a cloud. This spared us some of the worse effects of heat exhaustion. Which is not the same as to say we didn’t suffer. The distance to the top from where the path turns into a straight line of steep ascension may not be more than a kilometre, perhaps even less, but since it is really more of a climb than a walk — whereby I would define ‘walk’ as a bodily movement where a pair of human legs primarily do the job as opposed to a more simian type of ascension where all four limbs are not only useful but actually indispensable to bring one ahead.
The latter was the case here. As we got closer to the top we did stop every fifty metres or so to drink and try to assess the compass points across an ever expanding mountain region flooded by light and shadow, overflown by darkening clouds. We could hear thunder roll like avalanches deep down in the Cauca Valley and saw lightning run crisscross over no longer so distant summits. At this point I could see that Asíle was just as tired as I was and I again deeply admired her strength and courage. As for myself I had a serious problem even keeping my legs going, since both of them were cramping from the continuous effort of bringing a hundred kilos’ worth of flesh and bone up an unforgivingly steep mountainside. Even at only fifteen metres from the top I thought I had had it, but our guide rolled down to the crevice where I had ended up with leg muscles as tense as two over-engaged bow strings. He helped me to relieve some of the pressure by pushing my feet up against the legs in order to stretch the muscles back in their normal position. After a while the cramps ceded enough for me to make the final effort to the top.
Triumph! We had made it. The high plateau — and finally some reasonably flat ground — was no more than a natural shelf measuring some 60 by 20 metres. The panorama from up here comprised a huge portion of southwestern Antioquia, incidentally the most mountainous state in all of Colombia. But if overheating had been one of the problems to avoid while we were coming up, the cool rain that now began to fall from the cloud above us would perhaps had been a most welcome shower had it only lasted for two minutes. But this downpour, if not exactly a deluge, promised to become bone-chilling. It was accompanied by lightning and thunder.
Remember: we were at the top of the Cerro Tusa, where the nearest reminder of humanity was a rugged ten-foot iron cross, decorated with a small Colombian flag, fluttering in the breeze, and a couple of dangling tin cans making their modest contribution to the percussion of the spheres. The crude reality of the situation, however, was that iron leads electricity quite efficiently, and that we had nowhere to go to avoid a more and more possible lightning strike, except down the same way we had come, where the rain had begun to make the path even more slippery than before. Though we did have the time to take some heroic photos of one another, even one or two where I proudly pose with our guide, the latter, after the first lightning struck in our vicinity, was suddenly nowhere to be seen. Without telling or even advising us to go into hiding, he had, so Asíle assured me, taken shelter under some branches on the opposite side of the plateau. I realised we should have done the same, in this way protecting ourselves better from the rain, but all I could come to think of was to pull Asíle closer to me and to seek some kind of protection further down the trail, nudging us in as close as possible to a thicket of overhanging grass.
That the rain relatively soon stopped I now consider to have been our saving grace. Had it continued, the conditions on the slope would simply have been so difficult that there is no telling if I and Asíle would ever have made it. I was — of course a bit naively, credulously, not to say stupidly — wearing some Puma shoes designed to offer a decent grip on the surface of a dry indoor tennis court. Even if they hadn’t been specifically designed for that, they proved extremely inappropriate for serious mountain trekking and climbing. In the now prevailing circumstances they might jus
t as well have been a pair of skates... Yihaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
Even a month or two after the actual expedition took place, my shoulder joints were still not quite back to normal after the hits they were forced to take as I hung on to every branch and root I could find in order to avoid becoming a living mud sleigh taking a leap for eternity. Asíle too had to fight very hard to not fatally go off on a tangent. Our guide, back in business, seemed unperturbed by the ground conditions, but then again he had the right kind of boots on and could give Asíle the necessary assistance. I’m quite proud, though, that during this entire ordeal we both remained cheerful, even to the point of making provocative jokes in the face of the Grim Reaper! I don’t know how many times I lost balance and fell to the ground, only to be dragged downwards by the implacable force of gravity. My estimate is somewhere between twenty and thirty, and every single time this happened I needed to make sure I wasn’t going to break a leg or some other bone in my body as I hit the ground — buttocks first!
I’d say there are ways to make sure you’re still alive and at least not going to die from a heart attack within the next week, because if had I been susceptible to one, this would have been the moment to go. That it didn’t happen was reassuring. That Asíle (who was only all too keen to take all blame on herself) and I lived to tell the story was even better. Best of all, for me at least, is the sensation of having to some degree surpassed another real or imaginary personal limitation. I don’t normally feel the need to show myself brave and death defying when the necessity of it isn’t even at hand. But I believe Asíle and I accomplished something important by climbing Cerro Tusa, and something that, no matter what the future holds, has created another secret correspondence between us.
Coming back to the hotel, Asíle prompted me to go into the shower first. There was at this point no other solution than to walk in there fully dressed and begin cleansing by trying to remove the larger lumps of mud sticking to the shoes. But there was so much of it on my shoes and clothes that the walls soon were covered in dirt and the drain clogged up. We had to call the cleaning maid to help us get it working again. And when that was finally accomplished there was a short circuit in the electric wiring providing warm water, resulting in a powerful explosion, the residues of which stained the white tiles all black around the faulty wiring. At this time I was nearly done, but there was no warm water to be had as Asíle went inside the shower room. Even though the short circuit wasn’t really my fault, I apologised for the inconvenience I had indirectly caused her. But she would have none of it and instead went ahead without as much as a word of complaint, to take her cold shower while I was already comfortably installed on our balcony, a whisky at hand. As the warm water eventually came back on again, after the visit of an eccentric local electrician mending what had obviously been a precarious rigging in the first place, she also took care of our shoes and made sure they were cleaned and put out on the balcony to dry. When I told her I might just throw away the clothes I had been using, supposing the stains they had suffered would never come off, she responded that the clothes were already in the hotel laundry washer, and that of course the stains would come off!
I was immensely grateful for all this, but on the other hand I know that this is just who and how Asíle is, and nothing to interfere with. She wouldn’t allow me to give her a hand in this as she always considers it ‘her job’ to do the cleaning. Now that would make the perfect housewife, right? But it gets even better. On top of being a domestic phenomenon she’s also spiritually and physically richly endowed, enduring like an Indian in the face of travel hardship and a first-rate cook. She has intense big eyes, a fabulous chest, sensuous lips, and a great sense of humor; she’s a famished panther in some other important respects and loves to take a deep look at everything I have to offer… Now, how could I as a man, resist her? Above all: why should I!
Epilogue
Although tempted to end my script on such a climactic note, it would be lopsided to do so. There is, and has always been, as a contrast to my spontaneous love for life and its sensuous pleasures, a poetic, melancholy streak in my character. I’m not sure all those who more or less pompously call themselves ‘poets’ suffer the same ambivalence, but I feel confident in saying that all poetic natures invariably oscillate between the poles of an ecstasy of the senses and the unspeakable horror in being aware of existence as such.
It’s the essence of this awareness that makes up the terrifying spirit of man, hence of the mystery of life; a sense of being part and variation of a continuous enigma. I wouldn’t say that the passionate melancholy and loneliness pertaining to this quest for mystery is of a morbid kind; it’s more like an occasional but nevertheless habitual introversion, an illustration of the famous phrase commonly attributed to Ludwig Wittgenstein — although I believe having encountered it previously in Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s writings: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ For example: I can’t speak with any certainty about the existence of extraterrestrial beings, and so I shall remain silent hereof. But I have indeed, on rare occasions, witnessed some flying objects that were and ever since have remained unidentified by me. However, one of them, perhaps the strangest of them all, I have classified as yet another close encounter with the ever illusive Aleph. It appeared me to me in all its mysterious glory during a starry night over Lago de Atitlán.
I was comfortably seated in a deck chair on the outdoor garden terrace of Hotel el Amanecer in the village of San Pedro La Laguna, situated above the western shore of the lake. It was a beautiful clear night, slightly cool, but the hooded alpaca jacket I had bought at the market in Panajachél on the opposite side kept me warm in the nocturnal breeze. Though it’s perfectly true that I had indeed taken a sip or two from the magic pipe, I was not in a hallucinatory state. I should say that alone the longevity of the phenomenon about to present itself excluded any psychological exaggeration on my part. What I came to behold was a pulsating yellowish light, bright and big at its luminescent maximum while invisible to my naked eye at what I took to be its minimum. At first glance I thought it was some unusual kind of satellite. But it seemed much closer in the sky than a satellite and, if that was true, also moved much slower.
Even more bizarre was that the luminous object didn’t move in a straight or even a curved line. As it kept emerging and vanishing in intervals of about fifteen seconds, I found myself trying to estimate, in relation to its apparent speed and trajectory, where in the sky it would appear next. To my surprise my initial predictions were all wrong and remained so until I assumed that the light, constantly waxing and waning, was actually zigzagging its way, or, more precisely, wriggling like a snake through the interstellar medium. Once I had understood this I could quite well foresee where the light would appear next.
By this time the light had traveled from my western horizon towards the zenith and I anticipated that it would slowly but surely continue its meandering path towards Panajachél and eventually beyond the ridges of the lake, where it would become unobservable.
It would be very tempting of course to use some poetic license here, and say that the light then suddenly stopped and began to slowly rotate around its own centre to finally reveal the one point that contains all other points, e.g. an Aleph. Tempting, of course, since it would allow for fascinating fiction, but I would here like to remain truthful to my experience, and nothing of the sort really happened. As a matter of fact, the slowly pulsating light just continued across the sky in exactly identical fashion only to disappear beyond the eastern horizon, just as I had predicted. But although that was it, as far as my observation in relation to what seemed to be a perfectly objective phenomenon is concerned, many thoughts and feelings, notably memories, did cross my mind while the tranquil light appearance lasted. In terms of measurable and conventional time I’d say that the entire experience lasted for about ten minutes, but subjectively I felt it to be much longer.
One of the memories th
at came to me that night was my encounter with Dr. Henry Kesselman, an octogenarian retired dentist from North Carolina at the time travelling and photographing the poor of Mexico. He would typically appear in the main square of Oaxaca like the Piper of Hamelin, only it wasn’t by the sound of a flute that he enticed all the children to cluster around him, but by all the small change he handed them from out of his pockets. I became acquainted with Dr. Kesselman and we used to meet for breakfast in his hotel, where he was patiently searching for the correct words in order to describe, in the local vernacular, how he wanted his eggs done: ‘suave, estrellados’ (more frequently in other parts of Latin America: fritos) ‘de un lado’, (easy, sunny side up).
During our conversations Dr. Kesselman, or Henry as he presented himself, began to ask me about my preoccupations. When he heard that I was writing he immediately retorted: ‘But for whom are you writing?’ A bit evasively I answered: ‘For anyone who might be interested in reading what I have to say, I guess’. But that kind of vague and evasive answer did not satisfy Henry. He went on the attack and said: ‘You must always have a clear reader in mind when you’re writing, because you’re not just writing for yourself and your own pleasure, are you?’
Incidents of Travel in Latin America Page 37