Huari
We would soon be back on the Royal Road, at a small town called Huari. Our next walk would be a hundred-mile stretch in very remote country. We decided to buy a baggage animal to carry the bulk of our luggage: hiring would be no use, we couldn’t return it. Llamas only worked well in groups, and could be hard to control, horses were expensive and less hardy. It had to be a donkey. I already had a name for the animal. I would call it Dapple, after Sancho Panza’s beloved ass in Don Quixote.
While we waited for the late morning bus to take us the twenty-five miles to Huari, a boy about ten approached us politely begging; he had a severe clubfoot. I found some change and held out my hand. He looked at me plaintively, and pointed at the pocket in the knee of his trousers, using the stumps of his arms. Both hands were missing.
‘Was it an accident?’
‘No, I was born like it.’ He seemed a little ashamed of himself. I tried to talk. I seemed over-blessed in body and money. When he went away an old lady came across. ‘He’s a nice boy, that Alejandro. Did you give him money?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s all right, he’ll give it all to his mother. He always does. There are three families, they suffer in different ways in the limbs, always have. I went to school with a little girl with no foot. She married, had three children, all normal. It’s God’s will.’
The bus drove round Huari square as if reluctant to stop. We got out, which soon seemed a mistake. In a small town, the square is the only place likely to have quality buildings or public space. There were none. There is always a hostel of sorts on the main square. There wasn’t in Huari. There is always one café that appeals enough to have a coca tea to numb the tiredness, and ask advice. No. There is always a resident drunk, and he did appear promptly. He took off his cap, and bowed: ‘Señora and Señor, welcome to Huari.’ His skin was copper but his eyes were sea-blue: a flotsam European gene.
Little was painted, render was falling off walls. In early morning and at sunset, it looked picturesque, characterful and atmospheric: these were the old narrow streets that had been typical of Huaraz, before the aluvión. For the rest of the time, Huari was sad and impoverished: a place to buy a donkey and leave as soon as possible. Everyone was adamant we could buy a fine animal very quickly, but no one knew anyone who actually had one for sale. Near a second, smaller square, we found a small colonial hostel ablaze with flowers, then a young restaurant-owner eager to please. Elaine picked up the menu, ‘Look a whole page of local dishes, brilliant! No more chicken and chips while we’re here! I’ve been checking under my arms for feathers.’
The menu was in Quechua. The owner sat down with us and explained, for each item, the ingredients and the cooking method, and then left us to choose. We selected and salivated. Soon he was back. ‘Your first choices are,’ he wrung his hands as he told us, ‘unfortunately not available.’ We moved down the menu. Each item we ordered was off. In the end I said, ‘What do you have?’
‘Vegetable soup and chicken and chips.’
Elaine let the menu drop to the table. ‘Cluck.’
I bought fuel for the stove. The shopkeeper sniffed the dregs and declared the previous batch was petrol, though I had asked for kerosene. I had been operating it with the wrong nozzle, hence the problems. We walked round the town, chatting to everyone, and telling them we wanted to buy a donkey. In the meantime, we washed our clothes and ourselves in the shower, which was warm the first morning, but never again. For days we tramped around the neighbouring countryside, and took buses to hamlets and villages, only to find the prospective vendor was out, the donkey had been sold, or had never been for sale, or was a horse. It was Elaine’s first real experience of the frequent frustrations of life in the country, and the difficulty of getting even simple things done. Here, you might think about buying an animal for six months before you told your wife or husband, then start putting the word out to friends, look around for a few months, negotiate for several weeks, then change your mind. We wanted donkey Tesco; put one in the trolley and go to checkout. By now, we would have settled for a sheep with a good work ethic. Every time we went near the square, the blue-eyed drunk bowed and refreshed our welcome to Huari. By day four, I felt like joining him in a bottle of caña. We walked half a day to a village where there were four donkey dealers except on the day we went, when they were all out. We began stopping anyone travelling with a donkey, befriending them, then making a bid for the animal. One old lady looked at me as if I had offered to swap her baby for a pig.
‘Sell! I have had him for twenty-six years,’ she patted his head. ‘He stayed with me when all my children left.’ She took it as a sign of fidelity that he had not married and set up house elsewhere. I tried to divert her, ‘How do you tell the age of the animal?’
‘Look at the wear and tear on the teeth,’ she said, peeling back its lips and revealing a slobbery mouth, and long tusk-like teeth that belonged on a megatherium. ‘Around ten years old, they start to show wear.’ She pinched the loose neck flesh so hard the animal winced. The fold of skin fell flat right away. ‘Up to fifteen years, that goes back flat slowly. Here,’ she said, ‘put two fingers under the jaw.’
At last, a test which was neither unhygienic nor cruel.
‘That gap gets bigger as they get older. If you can get two fingers in side by side, like that, it’s probably over twenty.’
Elaine delved neatly in its mouth like a vet, and pointed to a few caries.
‘You’re a natural,’ I said, eyeing the thick saliva all over her hand.
‘I used to do all that with my cats and dogs.’
I said, ‘You’ve got the job.’
We got back to Huari mid-afternoon. It was very disheartening, and time was running out for Elaine. ‘I don’t have time to do this next walk now.’ She was close to tears. I said, ‘Let’s go in the first bar we come to. Maybe if my brain is addled, all this will seem normal and reasonable.’ I hadn’t seen the bar when I said it. The only other customers were an old man with no shoes (he may have drunk them) and a porter from the square who found carrying sacks rather complicated. They had a jug of chicha, home-brew maize beer. Chicha is a Carib word, brought from the Caribbean by the conquistadors, which has displaced the original Quechua word azua. Likewise, maize has displaced the Quechua zara. Few Spanish learned Quechua properly. The splendidly grumpy Inca historian Huaman Poma wondered how priests were capable of hearing confession, when the only local phrases they knew were ‘Take the horse’, ‘There’s nothing to eat’, and ‘Where are the girls?’
Our dead-beat fellow drinkers were regulars. The owner, a woman built like a wrestler, threw four shots of caña into each jug to liven it up.
I turned to Elaine, ‘You don’t want to drink here.’
‘Will anywhere else be any better?’ She slumped onto a wooden bench, and was about to slouch back against the wall when she saw the colour of it. I had a jug of chicha without the caña; she had coca tea.
I took a long draught.
‘What’s the chicha like?’
‘Try some.’
‘This is the one they ferment by chewing and spitting it into a bowl?’
‘Yep.’
‘Just tell me.’
‘Tastes like mmmm-mucus.’
‘Pass some over.’ Elaine sipped. ‘Yes it does, why are you drinking it?’
‘You can put your hand in donkey saliva, I can drink something that looks like it. Anyway, not drinking chicha didn’t work. I’ve had enough of trying, and being good and coping. I’m going to try sulking and giving up. If I pass out,’ I nodded at the porter, now well into his second supercharged jug, ‘he has a wheelbarrow.’
The bar owner and her daughter toasted a little maize for us, as a snack. They were very friendly. They didn’t know anyone with a donkey to sell. We went back to the restaurant, drank bottled beer, and waited for chicken and chips. The owner confided, ‘There’s a bullfight tomorrow at Cajay village.’
‘Is it close?’<
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‘Just across the valley.’
Elaine eyed another departing minibus. ‘I have the strange impression that more buses leave than arrive.’
A religious procession came into the small square, shuffling to a small band, carrying Christ in a sedan chair. They let off rockets; I watched them disappear into the sky. ‘That seems to be the only easy way to leave.’
‘They’ll probably land in a field and kill the last donkey.’
Bullfight
The bus dropped us among the throng of churchgoers in Cajay’s cement square. The only other outsiders were two Scottish mountaineers, having a day off to watch other people risk their lives. They vanished into a bar. Ancient roof tiles lay on adobe cottages like abandoned games of cards. A drunk with a freshly punched face lay on a bench. A young man, his face shining with alcohol, drew hard on his cigarette and lit homemade rockets that he held in his other hand, loosely pointed at the sky. They didn’t leave a picturesque trail, or burst into lights; they simply exploded like a shotgun and sent a whiff of cordite and bad eggs drifting over the assembling dancers. Two fiddlers sawed out verses without a chorus into the thin air: one a gap-toothed smiler with a sparse moustache, the other, a spectrally thin Henry Fonda, blind in one eye. An Andean harp shored up the tinny sound. The local priest was Swiss-German. He moved with self-conscious gravity among his flock, a head taller than any local men. Women brought their children forward for him to bless. His large hand divided the air before them, then lingered on their apple-brown cheeks and downy chins.
A second band arrived wearing multicoloured carnival clothes and golden crowns, their faces masked to look like Negroes, or Spaniards with twirly moustaches. Teenagers began a slow dance, as courtly and mannered as Versailles. Slowly the crowd assembled behind a diminutive man in a dark suit, wearing a black homburg with red and white roses woven round the crown. He carried a scarlet banner proclaiming himself, Dr Emiliano Salas, the President of the bullfight. His wife, Doña Carola, taller than him in her high heels, linked his arm. Ordinary Andean music for public occasions is not wistful panpipes, although El Condor Pasa has become an Andean anthem, and is heard everywhere. The only indispensable instrument is a drum. One the size of a gasometer began a heavy thudding beat. They led a procession down to the shade of a copse, where barrels of chicha were waiting.
Dr Salas came over with cups of chicha. We bowed; I introduced Elaine, then myself. When the party stood up to go, Dr Salas’s brother took Elaine by the arm. A student, her hair tied up, took my arm, saying ‘I’m Lari!’, and we began to dance up through the town to the thunder of the drums, arms linked, five steps rushing forward, then one back. There were three hundred of us, kicking up the dust. Full beer crates were slung onto shoulders. One drunken porter staggered so heavily that a clutch of men descended on him to remove the precious cargo. The only working muscles in the man’s body were those controlling the fingers holding on to the crate. It took five strong men to part them.
The procession filed into the quadrangle of the local agricultural college, where the sponsors had provided free food and drink. The bands took the balcony, and we were taken into the VIP enclosure: wooden benches in a pergola draped with cut vines to provide shade. Dr Salas swept us into its coolness. ‘Please, you are our guests for the day.’
‘Are you the mayor?’ I asked.
‘No, no! I am one of the sponsors. I am from Cajay, but I qualified as a doctor, and moved to Lima to train as a gynaecologist; that is my home now. And you are tourists in our country? What do you think of it? Only here, in the northern highlands, are they as hospitable as this.’ He paused to signal his brother to remove an old man from the end of our bench, and send him to sit in the sun. ‘And your work?’
‘I am a writer, I am researching a book about the Inca highways through the Sierra, from Quito to Cuzco.’ In Britain, when I say I am a writer, it provokes mild interest. Typically for Peru, an expression of respect stole over his features. ‘And how do you like our country?’
‘We like it very much, it’s our second visit.’
His brother came over with his young son. ‘And what will you write about today?’
‘My first bullfight.’
‘The first!’ He turned to the boy. ‘This lady and gentleman are from England, and have never seen a bullfight! Tell him how many you have seen.’
‘This will be my fifth!’ He examined these deprived strangers. ‘Do you not have bullfights in England?’
‘It has been illegal for over a hundred and fifty years. We never had Spanish-style fights, but large dogs were set on bulls.’
‘Dogs?’ the boy asked, plainly appalled.
I nodded. In a moment, I had become a barbarian. The brother stood up, bowed and went to have a word with his wife, a beautiful woman with large dramatic features, all red mouth, dark eyes and strong cheekbones. He returned. ‘It is decided, you will please do the honour of leading the dance with my wife, and I will dance with your lady-wife.’ His wife tied red and yellow neckerchiefs and sashes on us. Dr Salas waved a hand, the band struck up. It was my moment to escort Señora Salas into the centre of the arena, all eyes on the pair of us. It was traditional to unfold a shining white handkerchief, ironed to perfection, and flick it open for your partner to hold. After two and a half months living out of a backpack, my handkerchief looked like a failed biology project. I undid my new red kerchief, and we advanced into the centre of the courtyard, two tiers of bullfight enthusiasts cheering loudly, and began to dance. Elaine followed magnificently. As Señora Salas lived in coastal Lima, she was soon out of breath. I was passed from arm to arm, and was given the scarlet President’s banner to carry as we danced to the top of the village, where the football field had been fenced off and surrounded with makeshift stands. Some twelve hundred people cheered us into the ring. We were pelted with sweets and sprayed with beer shaken Grand Prix-style from bottles. The VIP enclosure was some wooden chairs on a bank at the head of the arena. We climbed up and, to save the seats for people with smarter clothing, sat on the edge of the bank with our legs dangling down to what I hoped was just above horn height. The President’s wife, Doña Carola, had a silver-coloured rabbit as a lucky charm. A live one. Its back legs were tied together with a pink ribbon, and she held it by the ears all afternoon. Before anyone was ready, the first bull escaped from the truck, and entertained the crowd by charging a policeman from behind. He was the only one who didn’t know it was coming. Only the crowd’s laughter alerted him. He sprinted away and cartwheeled over the top of the fence and into the stalls. It took twenty minutes to corner the bull and remove him. Doña Carola bent down to us, frowning. ‘We paid for a well-known matador, David Gamarra, from Spain. But he has pulled out claiming to be unwell. The real reason is they don’t like to fight at altitude. No one has heard of any of the men they sent instead. They’d better be good.’
I sensed if she wasn’t satisfied, the second bull would be held back while she went in to gore the matadors herself. All three bullfighters were around thirty, and slight but muscular in build. The principal matador leaned on the fence, dazzling in gold brocade, occasionally venturing out to see how the bull reacted. If it charged him, he slipped back behind cover, his step suddenly alert, his stance like a dancer. The cloud was thickening, the air darkened. The master of ceremonies signalled the men in the ring, ‘¡A la muerte!’ and drew the edge of his hand across his throat.
The next animal was San Pedrito, a heavier bull, a little over four years old. It was solid, and suspicious, with long horns that swept up from their ivory bases to dark grey tips. It was released cleanly, and the assistant matadors turned banderilleros, stabbing heavy metal darts into the great muscles of the neck, to weaken control of his head. The matador came out a few times to gauge its mood, which was no better than you might expect. In between, he became a Goya portrait, utterly still except for his eyes, which never left the bull. When the matador took over, he played the bull skilfully, eventually going down on
one knee with his back to it. He exchanged capes to pick up the red muleta, which he laid on his slender sword, the last six or seven inches of which curved down slightly. He worked to bring the bull to a standing position where he could finish it. Time after time, he was unable to hold the bull steady. Either it kept coming towards him or turned aside. His face was intense, showing pressure and frustration. When he eventually struck, it was out of impatience, not opportunity. The bull raised its head, foiling his thrust. The blade went in by the right shoulder, aimed at the aorta. It was badly deflected, and came out low on the front of its chest. He threw his cape over the bull’s head, it stood still, and he pulled out his sword. The wounds began to bleed. More than a dozen times he brought the bull to position but it would not stand facing him where he could strike. He lunged and missed altogether.
The crowd began to whistle and boo. ‘He’s suffering!’ cried a man at my shoulder. The matador finally set the bull up, but in a corner. The crowd, regarding it as a cheap kill, yelled ‘To the centre!’ The matador relented and worked the bull into the open. He struck. It was worse than before. The blade emerged half way down the animal’s ribs. The exit wound bled profusely. Dr Salas stood up: ‘Ladder, ladder!’ A stocky man behind us took a sharpening stone and a knife from a sack, and whetted it before climbing down into the ring. The matador’s face was locked on the bull, a mask of determination. He wanted to end it by his hand, and not be snubbed by lassoes and a knife. But he failed to hold the bull or the crowd. The laughter over the first bull, which never fought, was turning to tragic farce with this second one, which wouldn’t die.
Some local men walked past the matador and lassoed the bull at the far end of the arena, and fell on its tired head and held it low for the knife-man, who felt for a gap between two vertebrae and severed the spinal cord. The bull fell to its knees. The men who had held its head leaped back. Still it would not die. Several men stabbed at the neck, and held out cups to drink the blood. The back legs were tied together. They dragged it off. The front legs kicked weakly as they scored two lines through the dust. The knife-man returned to sit by us, a spot of blood on the brim of his hat, and one hand dark with gore.
Cloud Road Page 18