‘Certainly.’
I expected to be taken to a workshop, with some kind of vice to hold the gourd, and a rack of tools. She picked up a half-finished one from the bench, and a two-inch nail, embedded in a chisel handle. Holding the gourd in one hand, she began pricking the surface, one minute flake at a time.
‘You don’t draw the pattern on first?’
‘No, I put in some lines which run round the whole design and divide the surface up into the main scenes.’
‘And the lines you are making are white, but in the finished ones they are black.’
‘Come with me.’
In the field at the rear, we knelt in the grass. She set out a little mutton fat, dry grass, a box of Llama brand matches and a bucket of soapy water. ‘You rub the fat over the surface to seal the uncut surface. Then you burn the grass and rub the ashes over the pot, and into the engraved lines.’ She did so. ‘Then you wash the gourd.’ It took two minutes, start to finish.
‘How about the coloured gourds? Do you paint dyes onto the surface?’
‘No, they are burnt on.’ She took a thick twig and lit one end. ‘If you burn a little it goes dark yellow, a little more makes orange,’ she dabbed carefully at the surface, and blew on the ember again. ‘A little more and you get different browns, all the way through to black. We are lucky here, we have queuña trees, and the dry wood burns with very little smoke. Even so, in time, it hurts the eyes. My mother is the best carver in the family, her gourds have the finest detail, but she is forty and her eyes are weak from the smoke.’
They weighed next to nothing: I could buy some for Elaine, who loved them. I chose several, including an unusual one by Miriam’s mother. She had first dyed the gourd dark purple, then engraved the pattern, revealing the natural cream colour. The design showed seven llamas grazing beneath two trees high on a mountain, watched by a shepherd. Below, a man and a woman hoed a field by their houses, sacks of produce at their side. By a river, a spider’s web hung from flowers. This whole scene was just one inch square. Such work completely covered the applesized gourd. Miriam said it was four days’ work, and asked forty soles: two pounds a day. I didn’t quibble. ‘Would you write Por Elaine on the base?’
‘Certainly.’
She also added Mi Amor, blew it clean and smiled at me. ‘I could see those words in your eyes!’
Down the hill, the family of Pedro Veli Alfaro was at work in the garden. They specialised in folklore tales. He showed me a gourd with four scenes showing two young peasants meeting and falling in love. ‘There, they go together to tell her parents that they want to be married, and you can see the father beating him; that is traditional.’
‘Because she’s pregnant?’
‘No, the father always beats the suitor, to show he values his daughter and doesn’t want to lose her. My wife’s father beat me just the same way!’
The other reason to come to Huancayo was to take the train to Huancavelica, a small town in a mountain culde-sac, founded by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo to extract mercury from the mountains. I left my main luggage in the hostel, a rare treat to travel light. Mike smiled when I told him where I was going. ‘You’ll be fine, I’m sure,’ he said.
I stood outside the station watching the red light rise on a mackerel sky, and sipping hot turnip tea. I used my torch to find my seat in the unlit train. The horn gave a melancholy bellow, and the train bucked into motion. The engine was a monstrous orange diesel: we rocked from side to side, as if bound to jump the tracks. The broad valley soon narrowed to a gorge where tiny fields clung to ledges on the walls, and wires with slings below ferried people and animals high over the raging torrent.
Opposite me sat a teenage boy with an Amazonian green parrot. The train’s horn triggered rainforest memories, and the bird answered with a deafening screech. If it was not fed constantly, it slipped its upper beak into the corner of the boy’s mouth and bit his cheek so hard the boy whitened, but would not cry out. The stations rolled by: Manuel Tellera, Izcucach, Cuenca, Ccocha and Yaulli. Some were in open countryside, others served small towns whose food sellers swarmed aboard with bread, pork ribs, maize and beans. Five hours later, a ramshackle town came into view, girdled by ulcerated hills. These hills were once vital to milking the wealth of the Americas. Viceroy Toledo brought the latest know-how for refining silver using mercury. The mercury mines of Huancavelica speeded production at the fabled Bolivian mines of Potosí. So much silver was taken from Potosí mountain that it was reduced in height and became a honeycomb. Six million natives died there; the natives called it The Mountain That Eats Men. The only mining done now in Huancavelica is unofficial; a few families scour the rotting galleries. It is dangerous work: the earth itself is poisonous.
The galleries were entered by a stone gate cut in the rock, and commanded by the royal coat of arms. Slave labour hacked out ore with crowbars. Each blow released four poisons: two forms of mercury, and two of arsenic. Crammed in, they toiled like ants, coughing up blood and mercury, and died in their thousands, depopulating the countryside for tens of miles around. Native writer Huaman Poma’s long letter to the King of Spain advised him of abuses that he was sure the good monarch would rectify if only his advisers would inform him honestly of affairs in Peru: a common misconception about absolute rulers. He offered plain advice about improving conditions in the mines. ‘The first point, Your Majesty, is to put a stop to the practice of hanging miners upside-down by their feet and whipping them with their privates openly displayed.’ You can’t help thinking this is sound advice for labour relations in general.
I found a sunny room in a back-street hostel and went for a walk. The town’s colonial square had stately pines and a small, tiered fountain. I guiltily refused to have my boots cleaned by young boys with polish up to their wrists, because my boots are supposed to be treated to a special wax. The town was peppered with ancient churches in varying degrees of decay. The streets were full of offal scavenged by dogs.
Next day a small group of Swiss tourists arrived. Most tourists are very shy of the real Peru. The average tourist stays eleven days and visits only Lima, Cuzco and Machu Picchu. Among those who linger longer, the guidebooks have much to answer for. Lonely Planet carries an entry for each city called ‘Dangers and Annoyances’, which includes everything from altitude sickness to, in one town, serial rapists active in the area. Their authors obligingly look for things to fill it. Tourists are encouraged to use buses and taxis, not walk, and stick to places where there are other tourists: a reassuring face is one like yours. So guidebook backpackers follow the ‘Gringo Trail’ up and down Latin America, doing the picture postcard places, meeting the same travellers at each stop, avoiding serial rape after nine o’clock. Guidebooks simplify travel but they encourage honey-pot tourism; if you follow Lonely Planet, the one thing you’ll never be is lonely. On 700 miles of Inca roads, I never once met another tourist. They are all walking the thirty miles of Inca trail that lead to Machu Picchu, two hundred of them each day.
Huancavelica is definitely off the Gringo Trail, but is recommended, to travellers with a little more time, for its unspoiled Colonial square. The Swiss party was four men and four women, mostly blond, and entirely immaculate. Like many people who arrive in a group, they stayed in one. Lone tourists are either lost or waiting outside a lavatory for their partner. All eight looked lost. They avoided eye contact, even with me; all comments were mouthed quietly into the shared space between them. Coming from a country that has been rich for three or four generations, they were uniformly tall; the shortest woman was taller than any local man. Skin cancer being unfashionable, they were the deathly pale of factor 30 applied as a face pack. They drifted along the street like aliens unsure whether to make themselves visible. They never looked happy.
I could start to think how I looked to the locals: tall, white, bearded, well clothed from head to foot, rich. What kind of a job is ‘writer’? Writing is not a job. I have no purpose here. Why don’t I walk back to Inglaterra? Why
don’t I, at the very least, pay to have my boots cleaned?
I did. They shone.
Back in Huancayo, after an even longer and bumpier return train ride, Mike welcomed me back to the same room, with my pack and stick in the corner like two friends. He introduced me to Aldo, the owner. He was a warm, friendly man coming up to forty. ‘Come and join us for lunch, we’re cooking chicken properly, a middle-eastern recipe with rice.’
In a shop in Huancavelica, I had bought a book of writings honouring José Carlos Mariátegui, a writer who founded the Peruvian Communist Party and wrote, in a poem dedicated to another radical, ‘You are the light which shines on the path.’ This supplied the name for the infamous Shining Path Revolutionary Movement.
I read on the sofa outside my room, drinking in the rich garden. It was an oasis in the city. I envied Aldo, pursuing his art, living in a beautiful old house.
That night I bought scotch and we stayed up drinking. Mike fetched a tiny bottle of caña. It was sickly sweet, and terrifyingly strong. I made it to my bed and only woke at midday. And then at two and four and six o’clock. I was exhausted. I managed to get out for tea and sugar-filled cake, then went back to bed and slept another twelve hours. No matter what I drink, I can always get up. Must have been the start of some bug. Not the caña. Honest.
Next night I cooked for Aldo, Mike and some female friends, connections uncertain. I missed real cooking, and the market heaved with every animal, fruit, vegetable and spice of the Sierra and the coast. Among the sad caged falcons and the fat rabbits looking nervously up at them, I found all the ingredients to cook Indian: lamb jalfrezi. At four, I began boning a lamb shoulder and ribs. ‘Is there a sharp knife?’
Mike, not Aldo, came to look. ‘Possibly not, the truth is he doesn’t know what he’s got at the moment, his wife left him a month ago. She took stuff, he’s still not sure what.’ He stood up. ‘I know!’
He went to his bedroom and came back with a commando knife.
The meal was planned for eight o’clock, but the altitude wrecked that. The rice alone took an hour and forty minutes. We ate at eleven. I don’t know how much that meal cost Aldo in bottled gas. Meanwhile Mike said, ‘I’ve got something to show you.’ He took out photographs of a large orange engine standing in gravel at the edge of the Huancayo to Huancavelica railway line.
‘1998. We were on a day trip. One of the few places it could jump the track without falling a thousand feet. Thought I’d wait until you got back.’
At dawn, I boarded the bus for Ayacucho. It was the last real city before Cuzco, and a centre of rich cultures going back long before the Incas. It was also at the heart of a twelve-year campaign of terrorism which engulfed Peru in blood, and brought the country to its knees, until a Japanese former academic took office.
Stop Their Eyes
Ayacucho’s ill-lit streets felt medieval, leading me, beneath rough-cut stone walls pierced by dramatic stone gateways, past lumpen doors set with brass studs and iron bars, up to the main square. There was a sense of bustle, of people moving with purpose, as if time mattered. The dramatic colonial square revealed exciting glimpses of Inca-built masonry buried in ground-floor walls. Under the dramatic chiaroscuro colonnades, well-dressed people ate things that weren’t chicken and chips, sipped red wine and dabbed white napkins, making tiny rose stains. I joined in. A decade before, we bourgeois would all have been butchered.
Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. A government that ignores a section of its citizens gifts them to its enemies. Successive Lima governments have ignored the highlands in general, and the southern highlands in particular. Ayacucho, which means Corner of the Dead, has been a centre of resistance to this discrimination. In the 1960s, it was one of the poorest and most backward regions of the country. Nearly 70 per cent of the population were illiterate, and infant mortality was the highest in the world. One of the few things Lima ever did to promote the region’s economy was to re-open the university in 1959: ironic because into the philosophy department came Abimael Guzmán. Born in a hamlet near the southern city of Arequipa, in 1934, he was the illegitimate son of a middle-class wholesaler. He complained that his father would not pay for private schooling. But he always had more pocket money than other students, which he did not share, but spent on ice cream. Other Peruvian revolutionaries had aired their arguments among intellectuals, or targeted miners and factory workers, but Guzmán mobilised the rural poor. The education the Shining Path gave them was often their first.
Their campaign went public one eerie morning in Lima, on Boxing Day 1980. The city woke to find black dogs, their throats slit, hung from the lampposts of the capital, beneath placards reading ‘Son of a Bitch’. It was a crude attack on Deng Xiaoping, who was leading Chinese reforms of Mao’s doctrines. The Shining Path had not been able to find enough black dogs to kill, and had painted others black before cutting their throats. Guzmán was no anthropologist, but by luck, he had tapped authentic Andean resonances: the Wankas worshipped a dog-god, and the sacrifice of dogs was widespread. Had he truly understood the indigenous culture, and exploited its symbols effectively, he would have taken the country.
José Carlos Mariátegui, whose poem gave Shining Path its name, had argued ‘The force of revolutionaries is not in their scholarship; it is in their faith, in their passion, in their will. It is a religious, mystical, spiritual force. It is the force of the Myth.’ The Maoist ideal, where struggle was rewarded by Utopia, chimed with Andean views of cyclic time, where distinct historic periods were interspersed with pachakuti, episodes of violent overthrow. Other myths were resurrected by the Shining Path: that white men were witches, pishtacos, who killed Indians for grease from their bodies, an idea that encapsulated real exploitation in a mythic image. From now on, to call someone a pishtaco was to announce their death sentence. As well as offering political education, Shining Path won peasant support by providing them with armed protection against cocaine traffickers. They charged the traffickers to do business with the growers, grossing up to $30 million a year. Growers learned they could trust Shining Path more than the police, who often cut their own deals with drug barons.
But the Shining Path’s main business was to destroy the state to clear the ground for revolution, in Peru, and around the world. Guzmán and his followers seized Ayacucho in March 1982, flinging open the jails. Guzmán immediately withdrew; by the end of the year the police no longer dared go into the countryside, and stayed in town getting drunk with prostitutes. The government stripped responsibility for combating terrorism from the Civil Guard, and gave it to the army. Results were wanted, the means didn’t matter. The army proved that with their greater resources, they could repeat the police’s ill-judged tactics on a much grander scale. A war that had cost two hundred lives in the first three years brought over 7,000 dead in the next two. The tourist train to Machu Picchu was blown up, killing seven passengers and scuttling Peru’s fastest expanding economic sector. Journalists and foreign hikers were found ritually killed and buried face down, their eyes gouged out, and the sockets plugged with corks, to prevent their spirits recognising the killers. Their ankles were broken so they could not follow their killers and haunt them, their tongues were cut out so they could not name them. By late 1991, a US business risk assessor designated Peru the most hazardous country in the world to invest in. The economy was in ruins, and public health fell so low that cholera, a disease unknown in Peru since the nineteenth century, struck a quarter of a million people.
The arrival of President Fujimori in office in 1990 signalled a more determined assault on Shining Path. The conclusion was not a climactic gun battle, but a quiet arrest, the reward for unglamorous, painstaking police work. In 1992, detectives followed a Shining Path member to a safe-house in a Lima suburb. In the household rubbish, they found the brand of cigarettes smoked by Guzmán, and empty tubes of the cream he used for his psoriasis. Guzmán went quietly, advising his followers to give up the struggle. In his fifteen-year wake, he left 35,000 dead and
a poor country $25,000 million poorer.
The final leg of my journey would begin tomorrow and end in the Temple of the Sun, Cuzco: the Inca Empire’s holy of holies, where the son of the sun walked the earth, and I would take my dust. There was a final night to say goodbye to Ayacucho. In the main square, a service was finishing in the great cathedral; behind it, a roller of orange cloud hung like frozen surf. I walked towards it, out through the suburbs, into the surrounding desert. These are the nights when the hills lie dreaming. A meteorite buries its heat in the desert, and a lizard kicks dust over the star-travelled haematite.
4. Sacred Valley:
Cuzco to Pisco
Sacred Falcon
The modern road south to Cuzco bypasses what is now the small town of Vilcashuaman, or Sacred Falcon, but I wasn’t going to miss it. I could reach it from Ayacucho in a morning, stay overnight and return the following day. Built at the crossroads of the Royal Highway and the road from Cuzco to the coast, Vilcashuaman was regarded as the centre of empire. The battered Toyota minibus climbed for the first two hours. On the altiplano, at nearly 14,000 feet, a peasant family worked barefoot treading chuños, in a stream and on the bank. Two species of potato grow at high altitude; both are very alkaloid and hence bitter. Andeans expose the harvested potatoes at night to freeze, before trampling them and leaving them in running water to leach out the alkali. After three weeks they are retrieved and dried in the sun. The first time I ate them I thought they were poorly rehydrated dried kidneys. They are an acquired taste which I haven’t acquired.
Small groups of flamingos speckled the lakes. Austral thrushes dabbed at the yellow flowers of prickly pear. The coach was warm and stuffy. First the babies fell asleep, then the old people, and the men coming home from labouring, and the new-born lamb brought on by a man with a vacant, share-cropper stare, who wrapped it in his windcheater, and gave it his thumb to suck. Then me.
Cloud Road Page 28