Returning to the police station for some sleep, we took a short cut and lost our way completely. We made our way through fields and over fences, eventually coming to rest on the porch of a house. We had already climbed a stone wall when we saw a dog and his owner, illuminated by the full moon, looking like ghosts! But we didn’t realize that our figures, outlined against the night, would have been much more terrifying. In response to my polite “good evening” we heard only unintelligible noise — I think I caught the word “Viracocha!”* — and then man and dog fled into the house ignoring our apologies and friendly calls. We left, calmly, by the front gate leading on to a path which seemed more like the right way.
In one of those moments of boredom we went to the church to watch up close a little local ceremony. The poor priest was attempting a three-hour sermon but by then — an hour and a half into it — he had exhausted his stock of maxims. He looked over the congregation, his eyes pleading, while with his hands he pointed desperately to different parts of the church. “Look, look, the Lord has come to us, the Lord is among us and His spirit guides us.” After a moment’s truce, the priest set off on another tangent and just when it seemed he would hold his silence — a moment of high drama — he sent himself off again into similar nonsense. The fifth or sixth time that a patient Christ was introduced, we got an attack of hysterics and left hurriedly.
What exactly brought on an asthma attack I can’t say (though I can guess one of the faithful does), but by the time we arrived in Huancarama I could hardly stand on my feet. I had no adrenalin and my asthma worsened. Wrapped in a police blanket, I watched the rain and smoked one black cigarette after another, which helped to relieve the fatigue somewhat. Sometime near dawn I managed to fall asleep, leaning against a pillar in the hallway. By the morning I felt a little better and Alberto found some adrenalin, which along with some aspirin left me feeling as good as new.
We notified the lieutenant governor, a sort of village mayor, of our presence and asked him for a couple of horses to take us to the leper colony. The very friendly man attended to us happily, promising that in five minutes we’d have horses waiting for us at the police station. As we waited for the animals, we stopped to watch a motley group of guys exercising to the domineering commands of the soldier who’d been so kind to us just the day before. On seeing us arrive, he saluted us with great deference, then continued delivering his orders for every type of drill to the clowns in his charge. Only one out of every five young men of eligible age completes military service in Peru, but the rest are submitted to drills each Sunday and these were the soldier’s victims we were witnessing. In fact, they were all victims: the conscripts suffered the wrath of their instructor, and he his pupils’ sluggishness. Not understanding most of his Spanish; not grasping the fundamental importance of turning this way, then that; nor of marching then stopping at the whim of their boss, they did everything halfheartedly and were enough to make anyone get angry.
The horses arrived and the soldier allotted us a guide who spoke nothing but Quechua. The route began with a mountainous track which no other horses would have been able to cross, preceded by the guide on foot who took the horses’ bridles in difficult sections. We’d covered about two-thirds of the distance when an old woman and a boy appeared. They grabbed our reins and launched into a lengthy tirade of which we recognized a word sounding like “horse.” We thought at first they were selling cane baskets because the old woman was carrying a good many. “Me no want buy, me no want,” I kept saying to her, and would have continued in that vein if Alberto hadn’t reminded me that our interlocutors were Quechua, not relatives of Tarzan and the apes. We finally found a person coming from the opposite direction who spoke Spanish, who explained to us that these Indians were the owners of the horses; that they were riding past the front of the lieutenant governor’s house when he had taken their horses and presented them to us. One of the conscripts, the owner of my horse, had come seven leagues to comply with his military duty, and the poor, elderly woman lived in the opposite direction to where we were heading. We did what any decent person would do — dismounted, and continued along the road on foot, the guide ahead of us hauling all our things on his back. We completed the last stretch to the leper colony like this, where we gave our guide one sol in recompense. He thanked us profusely, despite it being such a pathetic amount.
The head of the clinic, Señor Montejo, received us, and though he couldn’t put us up he said he’d send us to the home of one of the region’s landowners, which is exactly what he did. The rancher gave us a room with beds and food, all that we needed. The following morning we went to pay a visit to the patients in the little hospital. The people who are in charge do a great job, even if it goes unnoticed. The general state of the place is disastrous; two-thirds of a small area — the size of less than half a block — is designated as a “sick zone,” and in it the entire lives of the 31 condemned take place. They pass the time watching indifferently for death to arrive (at least that’s what I think). Sanitary conditions are appalling, and though this might cause no adverse effects on the Indians from the mountains, people coming from other parts, even if only slightly more educated, find it enormously distressing. The thought of having to spend their whole lives between four adobe walls, surrounded by people speaking another language, with only four orderlies who make just short visits each day, causes nervous breakdowns.
We went into a room with a straw roof, its ceiling slatted with cane and an earth floor where a white girl was reading Cousin Basilio by Queirós. No sooner had we begun to talk when the girl broke down, crying inconsolably, describing her life as a “calvary,” a living hell. The poor girl, from the Amazonian regions, had gone to Cuzco where they gave her the bad news, and said they would send her to a much better place to be cured. The hospital in Cuzco, by no means perfect, did have a certain level of comfort. I believe her expression, the word calvary, was the only just expression for the girl’s situation. The only acceptable thing in this hospital was the drug treatment, the rest could have been borne only by the suffering, fatalistic spirit of the Peruvian mountain Indians.
The imbecility of the neighboring locals only heightened the isolation of both patients and medical staff. One of them told us that the head surgeon at the clinic needed to perform a more or less serious operation, impossible at any rate to execute on a kitchen table and lacking the appropriate surgical equipment. So he asked for a place, even if it was the morgue, in a nearby hospital at Andahuaylas. The answer was negative, and the patient died without treatment. Señor Montejo told us that when this leprosy treatment center was founded, on the initiative of the renowned leprologist Dr. Pesce, he himself had been responsible, from the center’s inception, for organizing new services. When he arrived in the town Huancarama, not one of the hostels or hotels would let him a room for the night; the one or two friends he had in town refused to give him shelter and in light of the fact that rain was looming, he had been forced to seek refuge in a pigsty, where he passed the night. The patient I spoke of earlier had to walk to the leper colony because there was no one who would lend her and her companion horses — this was years after the colony had been founded.
After welcoming us in great style, they took us to see a new hospital going up a few kilometers from the old one. As they asked for our opinions, the orderlies’ eyes shone proudly, as if the building was their own creation, built adobe brick by adobe brick through their own sweat. It seemed a little heartless to emphasize our criticisms. But the new leper colony has the same disadvantages as the old: it lacks a laboratory, it lacks surgical facilities and, to exacerbate matters, it’s situated in an area infested by mosquitoes, representing pure torture for anyone who has to spend a whole day there. Yes, it’s capable of housing 250 patients, a resident doctor and it has made some advances in hygiene, but there is still a lot to do.
After two days’ stay in the region, during which my asthma worsened, we decided to leave and try to get some proper treatment further o
n.
With horses provided by the rancher who had given us lodging, we set off on the return journey, accompanied by the same laconic Quechua-speaking guide who carried our bags at the landowner’s insistence. In the mentality of the district’s rich people it’s perfectly natural that the servant, although traveling on foot, should carry all the weight and discomfort. We waited until the first bend erased us from sight and took our bags from our guide, whose enigmatic face revealed nothing of whether or not he appreciated the gesture.
We again stayed with the Civil Guard back in Huancarama, until finding a truck to take us further in our determined northward direction, which we secured the next day. After an exhausting day of travel, we finally arrived in the town of Andahuaylas, and I went straight to the hospital to recover.
*Carlos Gardel was a famous Argentine actor and singer/composer of tangos.
*Inca Creator God. The term is sometimes also used by Indians for white people.
SIEMPRE AL NORTE
ever northward
After resting for two days in the hospital, and partly recovered, we abandoned that refuge to once again accept the charity of our great friends the Civil Guard, who received us with good humor as usual. We were so short on money we were almost scared to eat; we didn’t want to work until reaching Lima where there was the reasonable hope we’d find better paid work and save enough to continue on the road, since there was still no talk of turning back.
The first night’s wait passed well enough because the lieutenant in charge of the post, an accommodating type, invited us to eat, and we ate enough to store up for whatever lay ahead. Only hunger, however, by now a daily companion, marked the following two days, and boredom; it was impossible to go very far from the checkpoint since the truck drivers inevitably had to go there to get their papers checked, before beginning or continuing their journeys.
At the end of the third day, our fifth in Andahuaylas, we found what we’d been waiting for in the form of a truck heading to Ayacucho. Just in time, it turned out, because Alberto had reacted violently on seeing Civil Guard soldiers insulting an Indian woman who had come to bring food to her imprisoned husband. His reaction must have seemed completely alien to people who considered the Indians were no more than objects, who deserve to live but only just. After that, we fell out of favor.
With night falling, we left the village in whose obligatory hiatus we had been prisoners for several days. The truck now had to climb to the peak of the mountains guarding the northerly exit from Andahuaylas, and it got colder by the minute. To top it off, we were completely drenched by one of the violent regional rainstorms and this time we had no defense against it, installed as we were in the tray of a truck taking 10 young bulls to Lima and charged with their care, together with an Indian boy who was also the driver’s helper. We all spent the night in a town named Chincheros. As for ourselves, so cold we had forgotten we were also pariahs, without money, we ate a very modest meal and asked for one bed for both of us. Our request was accompanied, needless to say, by many tears and lamentations that must have moved the owner somewhat: five soles for everything. We spent the whole next day passing from deep ravines to the pampas, as they call the tablelands on top of the mountain chains throughout Peru. The country’s irregular topography knows almost no plains at all, save for the forested regions of the Amazon. Our job increased in difficulty with the passing of the hours, since the animals, having lost the layer of sawdust they had been standing on, and grown tired of waiting in the same position absorbing the jolts of the truck, started falling over. We had to get them back on their feet, because of the danger that an animal trampled by the others might die.
At one particular moment Alberto thought that the horn of one animal was scraping the eye of another and told the young Indian who was close to the action. With a shrug of his shoulders, into which he poured the whole spirit of his race, he said, “Why, when all it’ll ever see is shit,” and quietly continued tying a knot, the task he’d been dedicated to before being interrupted.
We finally arrived in Ayacucho, famous in Latin American history for the decisive battle Bolívar won on the plains circumscribing the town. The terrible street lighting plaguing the whole of the Peruvian sierra reached its worst there; the electric lights emit only the slightest orange glow which shines throughout the night. A gentleman, whose hobby it was to collect foreign friends, invited us to sleep at his house and the next day found a truck heading north for us, so we could only visit one or two of the 33 churches the little town holds within its urban boundaries. We said farewell to our good friend and set off again for Lima.
POR EL CENTRO PERUANO
through the center of peru
Our journey continued in much the same way, eating now and then whenever some generous soul took pity on our indigence. Still, we never ate very much and the deficit became even graver when we were told that evening there had been a landslide further ahead and we couldn’t pass; we would have to spend the night in a little village called Anco. Early the next day we set off again, mounted on our truck, but only a little way up the road we reached the landslide and had to spend the day there, starving and curious, observing the workers set explosives to the huge boulders that had fallen on the road. For every laborer, there were no less than five bossy supervisors, shouting out their opinions and hindering the work of the dynamiters, who were not exactly model workers themselves.
We tried to fool our hunger by going down to swim in the torrential river running through the gully below, but the water was too icy to stay in for long and neither of us is particularly resistant to the cold, as I’ve said before. In the end, after one of our stock stories of woe, one of the men gave us some corn cobs and another a cow’s heart and some offal.
A woman loaned us her pot and we began to organize our meal, but halfway through the task the dynamiters freed the road and the troupe of trucks began to move. The woman took back her pot and we had to eat the corn uncooked and put away the raw meat. To cap off our misery, night was closing in and a terrible rainstorm transformed the road into a dangerous river of mud. There was only room for one truck at a time, so those on the far side of the landslide came through first, followed by those on our side. We were among the first in a long line, but the differential on the very first truck broke when pushed too violently by the tractor assisting in the hard crossings, and we were all blocked again. Finally, a jeep with a pulley on the front came down from the other side of the hill, hauling the truck to the side of the road, allowing the rest of us to continue on our way. The vehicle drove through the night and as usual we went from more or less sheltered valleys on to those frigid Peruvian pampas where we were stabbed by the ice and driving rain. Our teeth chattered, Alberto’s and mine, from the chill caused by sitting in the same position, and we took turns to stretch our legs to stop them cramping. Our hunger was a like a strange animal, living not just in one particular part but all over our bodies, making us nervous and bad tempered.
We arrived in Huancallo with first light breaking and walked the 15 blocks from where the truck dropped us to the Civil Guard post, our regular stopover. We bought some bread, made mate and were beginning to take out our famous raw heart and offal but had not even stoked up the embers of a recently made fire when a truck heading to Oxapampa offered us a ride. Our interest in going to the place stemmed from the fact that the mother of one of our Argentine compañeros lived there, at least we thought she did. We were holding on to the hope that she might help kill our hunger for a few days and perhaps even adorn us with a sol or two. So we left Huancallo almost without seeing it, motivated by the eager cries of our exhausted stomachs.
The first part of the road was wonderful, passing through a little group of towns, but by six in the evening we had begun a perilous descent down an extremely narrow road, wide enough for only one vehicle at a time. It was generally the case that only traffic coming from one direction was permitted to pass on any given day, but for some unknown reason they had made th
is day an exception, and the trucks negotiated their crossings, shouting profusely and tightly maneuvering; their rear wheels inching out over the precipitous edges — not exactly a calming spectacle.
Alberto and I crouched in each corner of the truck, ready to jump for solid ground at the first sign of any accident, but our Indian traveling companions didn’t move a muscle. Our fears were based in fact, however, since a good many crosses punctuating this part of the mountainous coast mark the mishaps of less fortunate colleagues among the drivers using the route. And every truck that ran off the road took its tremendous human cargo with it, down the 200-meter abyss to the seething river below — laying waste to any hope of survival. Every single accident, according to regional accounts, had left every single person dead — not a sole injured survivor.
This time, luckily, nothing unpleasant happened and at about 10 at night we reached a village by the name of La Merced. It rested in a low-lying, tropical area and had the typical look of any jungle village. Another charitable soul ceded us a bed for the night and a huge meal. The meals were included at the last moment when the man came to see if we were okay and we had no time to hide the peel of some oranges we had picked from some tree to try and calm our hunger.
In the town’s Civil Guard post we learned unhappily that trucks didn’t have to stop to register, making it very hard to hitch any rides. While there, we witnessed the reporting of a murder, by the victim’s son and an ostentatious mulatto who said he was an intimate friend of the dead man. The act had mysteriously occurred some days earlier, and the prime suspect was an Indian whose photo the two men had brought with them. The sergeant showed it to us, saying, “Look, doctors, the classic image of a murderer.” We nodded enthusiastically, but on leaving the station I asked Alberto, “Which one exactly is the murderer?” And his thinking was much the same as mine, that the dark guy had a much more murderous aspect than the Indian.
The Motorcycle Diaries Page 13