I found a call centre and called her from a stuffy booth. She sounded surprised to hear from me at first, and apologised over her shoulder to a woman whose voice I didn’t recognise. She turned her mouth back to the phone: ‘You made it, Cuzco! Has it changed much?’
‘Seems smarter, but I think that’s just because I’ve been in the wilds so long. Is that Pat?’
‘No, someone you don’t know; we walk the dogs at the same time.’
I wanted to reminisce about our time here but felt constrained by her speaking in someone’s company. The booth was becoming more claustrophobic with each breath. But I wanted something from her. What was it? Approval? Admiration? A kiss from the lips I could hear moving but could not touch? While we spoke, the texture of her silences on the phone changed, as if she sometimes had her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Speak again tomorrow, love,’ I ended, and hurried out, urgent for air.
Walking the streets, I tried not to let myself dwell on a conversation that had left me feeling flat. In the spaces and buildings about me, I pictured the titanic struggles that had taken place. Murderous civil wars between conquistadors followed the defeat of the Incas. They were terminated by ruthless administrators: the viceroys sent out from Spain to bring the country under civil rule. The man who finished the job, and himself in the process, was Francisco Toledo. When the last rebel Inca, young Tupac Amaru, was captured and brought to Cuzco, Toledo, without authority and with every senior churchman and dignity in the city begging him for mercy, executed him. He died with great dignity, after making a fine, thoughtful speech, telling his people that their gods were a fraud, their messages concocted by the royal family and their minions. He commended them to the religion of the men who taught him his catechism while building his scaffold. As a reward to the Spaniards’ Cañari allies, Toledo let one of them flash the blade of Spanish steel down through the light, and send the young Inca into darkness.
Toledo ordered the head left in the square. A startled Spaniard looked out from his window that night. He had sensed some change outside, not a noise, but an atmosphere, a night-whisper. He started with shock. The huge square was a copper sea of heads bowed in silent worship. Each night, said the natives, the Inca’s head grew more beautiful.
Two regicides were too much for the Spanish king to tolerate, even if they were savage princes: ‘I sent you to represent a king, not kill one.’ Toledo’s career was over; disgraced, he soon died.
I strolled round the shadowy colonnades, bought a paper and found my favourite Mexican restaurant was still open, and, night after night, ate everything on the menu except chicken and chips. I went back to my room, and smelled all the things that had become so familiar, but were soon to be lost. On my clothes, pack and equipment were the sweat, earth and animal odours of the country. Strapped to the bottom of my pack was a souvenir woollen cinch with two iron rings and a strong odour of donkey.
Sacred City
Cuzco vies with Mexico City for the distinction of being the oldest continuously inhabited city in the Americas, and the centre is marvellously preserved. In the morning, I found my hotel window overlooked a rippling sea of terracotta tiles, and through the open window came the music from the shop next door: the haunting melody, ‘Llorando se Fue’ (‘Crying She Went’), my favourite Andean song. The tune would sound tantalisingly familiar to you. It was written in 1982 by the brothers Ulises and Gonzalez Hermosa, and recorded by their group. One day a friend rang them from Paris and held her phone to the television where they heard their tune. ‘Who’s playing it?’ they asked.
‘It’s the music for an Orangina advert.’ Someone had stolen the tune, and added a fashionable Brazilian beat and a new name: the lambada. It went on to sell fourteen million copies in five continents, the greatest selling single in the world that year. But the Hermosa brothers were not rustic folk musicians; they had registered their copyright. They sued for $5 million and won. Gonzalo was interviewed afterwards and said, ‘I still don’t want to learn to dance the lambada.’
I crossed the main square, climbing. The cathedral above me was built on the remains of the palace of Viracocha Inca. The rival Jesuit La Compañia church was to my right, and the long low porticoed colonial buildings closed in all the rest of the plaza. The original Inca square, a reclaimed swamp, was more than double the size. Before the city fully woke, I wanted to see the greatest of all Inca fortresses, Sacsaywaman, which stands on a hill above the north of the city. The bones of the past still surface in the city-centre streets. The base of the building to my left was made of perfectly cut stone courses. This was the Casana palace, home of the handsome, pale-skinned Wayna Capac, father of Atahualpa. It was the greatest of all the palaces, with a hall that could hold a thousand people. When Cuzco fell, Francisco Pizarro himself took it as a house. Pizarro remains a cipher, a man full of ambition, steadfast purpose, but no destination. When he arrived, the city was already like a ship in the hands of breakers. He showed little interest in what it had been.
He had been an able and brave general, a leader able to hold together self-serving adventurers in the most daunting circumstances. But he was not skilled to fill the governorship he was awarded, nor did he have sufficient loyal men on the ground. He spent the rest of his life rewinning the conquest, fighting the native population, former comrades and belligerent new Spanish immigrants. Unlike a Bolívar, he lacked true vision; he knew soldiering, and he did it well. He understood booty, but not industry, nor government. He didn’t even display a peasant’s sense of good husbandry. Meat soon grew so scarce, unborn piglets sold for 16 ounces of gold, and once born were soon eaten.
Many conquistadors lived and died like gangsters, perishing in turf wars, feuds, vendettas, executions and jail. Of the Pizarros, Juan perished like a soldier, at Sacsaywaman, Gonzalo was hanged for rebellion, Pedro drifted from view. The only one who seemed to have enjoyed his money was Hernando, and he did so in the enforced leisure of a prison in Spain, after garrotting Diego de Almagro when he was a prisoner of war. In revenge, a posse of Almagro supporters stormed into Francisco Pizarro’s Lima palace, and, after a short struggle, killed him. He died making the sign of the cross in his own blood as a water jar was smashed onto his skull. His body was buried at night, in an obscure corner of the cathedral, by a Negro slave, working half-blind in the glimmer of rush tapers. His affairs were so disordered the funeral was at the public expense.
I sped up the narrow passageways, past Qoricalle, meaning Gold Street, and past the ancient palace of the second Inca, Sinchi Roca, who ruled around 230 years before the conquest, and up Resbalosa, Slippery Street, named for its smooth cobbles. These tight streets emerge onto an irregular plaza, in front of the church of San Cristóbal. Holding up the hill behind the church is a much more ancient wall, with twelve niches the size of large doorways. It was said to be built by the first Inca of all, Manco Inca, of whom it was said, ‘He lived to be old, but not rich’, perhaps because he spent his money building Qoricancha, The Temple of the Sun. On this spot he built his residential palace, Colcampata. Most visitors just walk on up the lane to the staircase that leads to Sacsaywaman. But a short walk down a track to the left brought me to a half-overgrown gateway, whose multiple jambs and lintels signified great prestige. This was once the gateway to the palace occupied by two puppet Incas, Paullu and Carlos, whose reigns as Spanish stooges lent them privilege but not power. In the undergrowth behind was a curious standing stone four feet high. Cutting back the vegetation I found that one side bore a carving of a frog or toad. Each year, in September, all ordinary work would stop. The Inca would come to this field and plant the first maize of the new season, turning the earth himself, identifying himself with the fertility of the land and the prosperity of the country, a role of kingship which goes back to the earliest known cultures along the Tigris and the Euphrates.
The path up to Sacsaywaman became a fine broad Inca stair. Soon I was walking under a wall made from Gargantuan stones, but I continued to the back of the site to begin wh
ere the rising ground gave a view of the fortress. I found the large circular structure, like the arena of an amphitheatre, discovered only in 1985, and believed to be a water cistern. It may have been of religious importance, as well as supplying the fortress with a water supply; the Incas preferred to unite, rather than divide, functions.
It is often said, without contemporary authority from any Inca source I know of, that Cuzco was built in the shape of a puma, with Sacsaywaman as its head. If so, it is a spiky, shaggy head, the defensive walls built in zigzags. It was a technique that lengthened the battlements, allowing more defenders to attack assailants, and, by creating a variety of angles from which to attack, making shields less effective. In a conventional masonry wall, the physical weak point of such a structure is the tip of the tooth, which assailants can attack from two sides. But these stones were so colossal such attacks were futile. Cieza de León marvelled, ‘There are stones of such size and magnificence in these walls that it baffles the mind to think how they could be brought up and set in place, and who could have cut them, for they had so few tools.’ The largest individual stone stands twenty-eight feet high and weighs 360 tons. It is one of the largest stones in any building anywhere in the world. Still more monstrous stones were abandoned lower down the hill.
It was begun by the Inca Pachakuti around 1440 after Cuzco had been all but destroyed by an uprising of the Chankas. Over a thousand feet of three-tiered wall was largely complete when the Spanish arrived ninety years later. Although the chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega was called fanciful for saying 20,000 men worked on Sacsaywaman, Cieza de León agrees, and says the native records for it remained in his lifetime, proving they worked in shifts for sixty-eight years. The records were kept on quipus, devices that look like skirts of knotted string, and worked something like abacuses. From these soft, woollen records, we know the depth of the toil: 4,000 quarried and cut stone, 6,000 hauled with leather or hemp ropes, 10,000 dug ditches, laid foundations and cut timbers. The stones were worked mostly with stone tools, preferably the tough iron ore haematite, which might be meteoric in origin: a fortress for a sun-king, hand-made with tools from the stars. Bronze tools were used for cutting holes, and sand and water to polish the final surface. Percy Harrison Fawcett, the British explorer and fabulist, reported a friend’s tale of finding a pot in an Inca grave. It was knocked over, spilling a liquid on the ground. When they went back to it they found the liquid had dissolved the rock, and it could be smoothed like wet cement. Such myths are not necessary. Modern archaeologists have demonstrated how stone tools can be used with a rapid, bouncing action, to shape all the rocks used in Inca structures. Time and patience are the only mysteries required.
I walked down to the hollow and crept below the main walls. I had expected to be impressed: I wasn’t. I was overwhelmed, slightly stunned, by the combination of the mass of the stones, the size of the ramparts and the precision of the work. I wound my way up the ramparts’ terraces through trilithon gateways up onto the small plateau where the three keep-like towers once stood.
The first Spanish entered Cuzco peaceably in March 1533. Soon the puppet Inca Manco was in place, another son from the fertile bed of Wayna Capac. Spanish treatment of him showed the conquistadors were deficient in almost every requirement of government except brutality. Despite his being chosen as their own puppet, they treated Manco with vicious contempt. One day, Gonzalo Pizarro, who despite serious competition was easily the most unpleasant of the Pizarro brothers, decided he should have an Indian princess, though they seldom married Incas except for dowries. He decided it should be Manco’s principal wife (who was also his sister), Cura Ocllo. It was a profound insult to her, and to Manco, for it was not just a formal marriage of state, they were much in love. When the High Priest, the second most important man in the Inca hierarchy, protested, Gonzalo told him, ‘If you don’t keep quiet I’ll slit you open alive and cut you in pieces.’ Manco let her go when he realised he would be imprisoned if he didn’t. Within a year, he saw no way forward but rebellion. In 1536, he seized Sacsaywaman and took control of most of Cuzco.
The lack of effective Inca weapons to kill armoured men and horses cost them their empire. Without them, they even failed to retain Sacsaywaman. Traditional weapons included clubs, slings and spears. The slings were their most dangerous weapons, nearly as good as a gun, thought one Spaniard. The Incas had conquered Amazonian groups who used bows, but never seem to have adopted their wholesale use. They had some metal weapons, though no iron until the Spanish arrived. But they had no means to mass-produce them, so there was no way to equip the rank and file soldiers with metal weapons. In any case, metals were associated with status and rank, not utility.
The decisive action was a hand-to-hand battle, fought around the three towers. Things had gone poorly for the Spanish. Juan Pizarro, the best of the Pizarros, affable and generous, as well as brave, was struck on the jaw by a stone, which swelled until he was in too much pain to wear his helmet. Rather than rest, he fought the next day without a helmet, and in the evening was struck on the head again, and died soon after. All seemed lost until a Spaniard called Hernán Sánchez, fighting alone, climbed a scaling ladder and slipped into a window on the ground floor of the greatest tower. He attacked all those inside so ferociously they fled up the tower. An Inca lord wearing a captured Spanish helmet defended the roof, ferociously wielding a sword and an axe, attacking not just the Spanish, but any Inca soldier who talked of surrender. He was wounded, but carried on as if nothing had happened. He was wounded again, and fought on. In grudging admiration Hernando Pizarro ordered him captured alive. The Spanish wore down the defenders until the Inca lord fought on alone. When he saw it was hopeless, he hurled his weapons at the Spanish, climbed the walls, filled his mouth with earth, gouged bloody lines down his cheeks, and hurled himself from the battlements.
The towers were subsequently plundered for stone to build new Spanish palaces; today they are just masonry rings in the turf. But the retaining walls were too massive to dismember. They run for nearly a quarter of a mile along the hill. Cieza de Leon: ‘This was the grandeur of the Incas, the signs they wished to leave for the future.’ How the signs of that greatness must have changed value in their minds, as they saw the Spanish had won. The strangers had not been amusing dupes, temporarily useful to deploy in their civil war, but their nemesis. Society, like empire, would unravel, be re-woven into a coarse new cloth that itched and never sat well. Young Cieza de Leon, a boy soldier, saw this sadness take over. ‘I remember seeing with my own eyes old Indians who, when they came within sight of Cuzco, stood looking at the city and making a great outcry that afterwards turned to tears of sadness, contemplating the present and recalling the past, when for so many years they had had rulers of their own in that city who knew how to win them to their service and friendship in a different way from that of the Spaniards.’
The ageing Inca historian Huaman Poma, never more content than when he was censoring others, had opinions on how the various groups conducted themselves after the conquest. He thought Indians affecting beards ‘looked like boiled prawns’, while Spaniards without beards ‘looked like old tarts in fancy dress’. As for the ordinary Christianised Indians, he thought they would do all right if only they could resist the temptation to get drunk and drugged at festivals, and commit incest with their sisters.
With this, we take our leave of Huaman Poma. He worked on his Letter to a King for decades, as kings came and went. He died, aged about ninety, in 1615, leaving a chaotic and eccentric manuscript of 1,400 pages. It was sent to Spain where it lay unread for 300 years: his witness as mute to the monarchs of Spain as the Bible had been to Atahualpa at Cajamarca. It is just as well. Had it been read while he was alive, they would have seen that his praise was decorous and formal, while his criticism came right from the heart. Of all the chroniclers, he provides the most laughs, though there is something Pooterish in him, and when he rides his hobby-horses about the new and infamous times, sometimes I would
have been laughing at him, not with him. His manuscript ends with a sentiment any writer understands:
When I undertook to do this thing I believed it beyond my literary powers, although to have done what I have done, God alone knows how much I worked at it.
Farewell.
Qoricancha
If Sacsaywaman is the head of Cuzco’s puma, the tail is the confluence of the two small rivers which were canalised to run sweetly and cleanly through the streets of the city. Within it lies Qoricancha, the most important precinct in Cuzco. From the main square I cut down a long, narrow alley, now known again by its original Inca name, Inti K’ikllu, Passage of the Sun. The Spanish renamed it to reflect new business: Prison Street. Its left-hand side is the largest extant wall of any Inca building in Cuzco, belonging to the Temple of the Virgins. One block lower is a small park, a rare green space in the dense city, lying below terraces where flowering shrubs blazed yellow, and lizards skip-flicked into crevices in the walls. Once, the bushes and the lizards were pure silver and gold.
The Temple of the Sun, which commanded these gardens, is regarded by many as the greatest temple in all the Americas. Once gold or silver was brought into Cuzco, it was forbidden to take it out again, on pain of death. It became the greatest display of power, prestige and wealth in all the empire. This is the last time we shall hear from Garcilaso de la Vega. He finished his history of the Incas, or Royal Commentaries, very late in life. He died, still in Spanish exile, on 22 April 1616, the day before Shakespeare. He was aged about seventy-six. Miguel Cervantes died the same ill-starred year. Garcilaso’s unconsidered remains were buried in a Spain that remembered him only because his dangerous history reminded Peruvians of their magnificent Inca past. In the nave of El Triunfo church is a small flight of stone steps which leads down into a small stone vault whose walls are lined with semi-circular niches like pigeon holes. It looks like an empty post office. There is no tomb, just silver letters embossed on a black plaque, recording that King Don Juan Carlos I of Spain and Doña Sofia brought home his remains on 25 November 1978. With his mixed parentage, Garcilaso was the first hybrid voice of the Americas. His heart was pulled both ways, suffering the crisis of identity that still bedevils many four centuries later. His ability to move comfortably in both camps makes him the most complex of the chroniclers. Remembering Qoricancha, Garcilaso considered the other chroniclers and reflected that ‘nothing they have written, nor anything that I might add, could ever depict it as it really was’. Only three Spaniards ever saw it intact, when they were sent ahead to speed up the delivery of Atahualpa’s ransom to Cajamarca. They are our only window on its finest treasures, but they were illiterate louts, and remembered little but the weight of the loot. There was a solid gold statue of a man, his arm raised in command, that might have been the god Wiracocha. There was a field of silver maize with golden corncobs, growing from clods of golden earth. Nearby grazed a flock of twenty llamas, fashioned from 18 carat gold, one of which was weighed at 58 lbs. Looking after them were golden shepherds with golden slings, leaning on golden staves. All the trees and plants of the area were reproduced in precious metal. There were snakes and lizards; butterflies and birds danced on the slender boughs; snails snuggled on the leaves.
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