Ted Conover
Page 3
Her name was Lyda, she was about thirty-five, and she and the grapes were bound for Abancay. Her family had a fruit stand there, and every week, she said, she hitched a ride down here to the coast, bought grapes, and then found a ride back home for her and her grapes. It was usually a three-day trip. (Sebastián would be paid a nominal amount for his help; he could use the money—and truckers always appreciated female companionship.) “Is that ever hard to do?” I asked, thinking that to be female, in the dark, by the side of the road with a ton of grapes and your thumb out was not the best situation to be in. She shrugged and said no, it almost never was.
We ate chicken and potatoes at a down-at-the-heels diner outside Pisco, a town that was home to a grape liqueur used in the famous Peruvian cocktail with frothed egg white, the Pisco Sour. Lyda had short hair and pearl earrings; she was chatty and seemed perfectly comfortable eating with three strange men. Around midnight, Sebastián pulled into a gas station with a large guarded truck park and turned off the engine. He lowered a narrow upper bunk to horizontal position and sent me up there. Edgardo retired to the roof, to protect our load from thieves. As Lyda got settled in the lower bunk, Sebastián cranked the windows down about an inch. Then he lay on the lower bunk next to her, head-to-feet.
It was hot and stuffy and mosquitoes buzzed all around. I heard my cabinmates shifting restlessly. “Maybe we could open the windows a little more?” I suggested. “But people would be able to reach in!” Lyda objected. Then I understood: it was all about thieves.
We tossed and turned until four a.m., when some sharp raps on the door woke everybody. Management wanted the trucks out of there. Sebastián started the engine as we washed up at a tap and then, just before shifting into gear, crossed himself.
During the night, he and Lyda had been speaking in a language that was not Spanish. They confirmed to me that it was Quechua, the ancient tongue of the Andes. I knew that Lyda was from the sierra; Sebastián now told me that his family had moved to Lima from a little mountain town up north. In Quechua, Lyda said, the way to ask someone’s name was Imata sutiqui? The answer was sutiymi and then the name: Sutiymi Sebastián Cisneros. “If the Spaniards hadn’t come, we’d all be speaking it, all the time,” Lyda said. This conversation coincided roughly with a sign announcing how many kilometers remained before we came to Nazca, of the famed desert figures. We were on a modern highway and in a modern truck, but it became clear we were passing through a place that was very old. It was not hard to get them to talk about what had been here.
Peruvians all know that the Inca empire, pre-Columbian America’s largest, was not the first civilization on their soil. Somebody was constructing pyramids and raised platforms by 3000 B.C.—about the same time civilization began in Mesopotamia and Egypt. The Chavín culture, dating from 900 B.C., is the oldest one to have a name, but many came after, inhabiting coast, desert, and mountains up until the aggressive Inca state, with its center in Cuzco, arose in the early fifteenth century.
One of the earliest was the Nazca, which flourished on the coastal plain we were driving across, toward the foothills of the Andes, between the second and fifth centuries. While the Nazca left behind scraps of vividly embroidered textiles and sections of canal (they lived in a narrow valley along a seasonal river that flowed down from the Andes to the sea), what they are remembered for are the Nazca Lines. This series of geometric shapes (rectangles, trapezoids, in a straight line over five miles long) and giant drawings is etched over nearly four hundred square miles of desert. The fact that many of these drawings, seen from above, are recognizable figures (a monkey, a hummingbird, a spider, a flower) was lost to human knowledge for hundreds of years until a scientist looking for evidence of ancient canals flew over the area in 1927. Tourists—unlike the Nazca, who had to imagine it all—can now have the same aerial view for about fifty dollars. The Peruvians I was driving with, however, had never flown in a plane. Sebastián could tell I was interested and pulled over at an observation tower where we could get a better look.
It wasn’t ideal: all we could see from the top, about the height of a three-story building, were short sections of figures known as The Tree and The Hand. It was actually more interesting down on the ground, where you could see for yourself how removing the top inch or so of gravelly desert surface revealed significantly lighter stones underneath.
Lines like these were etched on deserts elsewhere in South America, Central America, and North America long before Columbus came. Most were long presumed to be roads; not until the past fifty years have many been shown to have astrological significance, with lines pointing at a spot on the horizon where the sun sets at the beginning of a solstice, for example. Some of the Nazca Lines apparently were a calendar; scholars have suggested that keeping track of the seasons helped the Nazca anticipate when the streams from the Andes would begin to run in spring, for example. But it’s also tempting to articulate what seems obvious, using that word scientists so avoid: that the drawings were pictures for God. Or gods.
That made it feel a bit uncomfortable to be back in the truck, driving across them. It was like stepping on a church pew, or dropping the flag. Then again, the desert has been crisscrossed for centuries by subsequent cultures, not least of them the Inca. Of the many more recent lines cut across this particular canvas, several are thought to have been Incan roads. This plain between Cuzco and the sea was traversed by, among others, runners called chaski, who, in a sort of Pony Express relay, could complete the 150 miles—and an elevation gain of 10,912 feet—between Cuzco and the sea in a day. Among their missions: to carry fresh fish to the rulers in Cuzco.
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The difficulty of that became clear as the road began to curve and climb outside Nazca: it would be pure mountains from now on. The land was dry and the people poor. A short, round woman with a black top hat and braids seemed amazed when Sebastián asked to see the dusty music cassettes behind the counter at her roadside shop; and downright shocked when he bought two, mountain music by Peruvian groups. He popped them into the truck’s deck and for a while the mood was light. Then he told me that, for a few years during the 1990s, because of guerrilla activity—the Shining Path—he’d been unable to take this relatively direct route to Cuzco, and had to drive via Arequipa instead. As the truck groaned up a canyon, we passed a pull-out on a straightaway where, he said, one day guerrillas had set up a roadblock. They took just money from him—a “revolutionary tax”—but he watched as two Frenchmen and an American were singled out from the passengers on the bus ahead of him and, by the side of the road, shot dead.
The Maoist doctrines that had taken root in large zones of the arid, impoverished mountains were now in retreat, or at least in abeyance. But radical sympathies lived on in this land of the dispossessed. From the truck window, I saw a stall in a market town that offered not only T-shirts with the visage of Che Guevara, which you might see in an American mall, but also those with that of Osama bin Laden, which you would not.
(In a different mountain village, later, I would ask a teenager wearing a bin Laden shirt why he was doing so. He looked at me quizzically and replied, as though it were obvious, “Because he’s a champion of the world’s poor.” I thought about that for a moment. “Of the world’s poor Muslims, maybe,” I said. “But not of you.” He just looked back at me without saying more.)
When the road started getting narrow and tortuously curvy, Sebastián would reflexively tap his horn as he swung into the opposing lane at the beginning of a turn. It was practically aerobic exercise, whirling the steering wheel back and forth, trying to keep his trailers on the pavement. The quality of the road surface varied widely, and when it got particularly bad, a common sight would be a man with a shovel standing near a pothole, purportedly chucking some dirt into it, and with his hand out—seeking a donation for this work that he may or may not have been performing. Once or twice Sebastián leaned out the window to give change to these beggars, but mostly he just kept going.
He did not h
ave that option around noon that day, near a verdant area called Pampa Galeras. A man presented himself squarely in the middle of the road so that Sebastián had to either stop or hit him. He stopped. The fellow presented himself at Sebastián’s window, and put his hand out. He had a deranged look, his clothes were tattered, and he didn’t really speak. Sebastián offered him some coins but he wasn’t interested; he was hungry, and pantomimed eating. But apart from the grapes in the trailers, we had no food. Sebastián had a liter bottle half full of water and passed it through the window. The man took it and shuffled away.
At this point I was feeling very odd. It was only cool in the mountains, not cold, but I had a little shake. I’d had less than four hours of sleep, and restless sleep at that, so that was a possible explanation. A small amount of exhaust from the engine seemed to make its way into the cab; it could be that. I was carrying pills for soroche, altitude sickness, having once suffered it after flying into Cuzco on a family trip. But I felt that gaining elevation at the sluggish speed of a loaded tandem rig wasn’t likely to be an issue. Then there was the fact that we had just encountered our third wandering man with mental problems in less than twenty-four hours. The previous one I had noticed at dawn in the middle of the vast desert, maybe a hundred yards off the road, between two earthen walls of an old structure: a wild-haired guy sitting shirtless and bearded before the flames of a tiny fire. Could it be that for him the highway was a way to live on the margins, to find the peace of being alone, but also, presumably, a way not to starve? The thought of these desperate-looking wanderers was upsetting, but I didn’t think it was making me feel physically ill.
We stopped for an early dinner in a town called Lucanas. The simple restaurant was, unfortunately, in the shade, and my shivering increased. Sebastián donned one of the knit alpaca caps, with pointy top and tasseled ear flaps, that tourists to Cuzco come home with. I took aspirin and I took the soroche pills, just in case—one was supposed to start them twenty-four hours in advance of the elevation change, but I figured it couldn’t hurt. Lyda and Sebastián were discussing an upcoming festival in honor of Cuzco’s patron saint, Nuestro Señor de los Temblores. “Our Lord of Tremors?” I asked, in my near-incapacitated state.
“Our Father of Earthquakes,” Sebastián corrected me.
Fortified by the meal, he kept driving, and as night fell, we climbed higher and higher. I got worse and worse. Despite the pills I had taken, a wrenching headache set in. A bit longer, and I got dizzy. Then restless: I needed to sit in front, instead of on the bunk in back; then I needed to sit in back. Sebastián started looking worried. Lyda entered nurse mode, rubbing my shoulders, putting a blanket around me and then taking it off when I began to be soaked with sweat. Sebastián asked me things I could no longer make out; he declared my illness to be soroche. Instantly I knew he was right and also knew that meant there was a potentially steep downside for me, a chance of cerebral edema if I didn’t get to a lower elevation. I told him he’d better turn around, that otherwise his gringo might die. He looked torn: we were already at our highest elevation, he said, on the altiplano, about 13,000 feet high. Getting down would mean two hours of backtracking, or two and a half of forging on.
Suddenly I told him to stop. I was going to throw up. I rolled down the window as Sebastián pulled the truck over. Edgardo preceded me down the passenger-side steps to make sure I wouldn’t fall off. It was pitch-black and a cold gale whipped our hair; yet still I couldn’t take a full breath. I walked a couple of yards away from Edgardo—he was wearing rubber flip-flops in the frigid cold, I recall—and realized that what I really needed to do, instead of vomiting, or in addition, was empty my bowels.
With tears, fever, despair, and a headache equal to that of my worst hangover ever, I weathered the next few hours. The truck’s headlights probed the darkness, and hurt my eyes. No cars came the other way; we passed nothing. At eleven p.m., having descended somewhat, Sebastián pulled over to doze; I saw that we were off the plain and into mountains again, so we must have descended some, but still I wheezed, shook, and held my head.
Sebastián awoke at two a.m., eager to make it to a river crossing by six a.m., when road construction would close a part of our route near Chalhuanca. When we stopped for breakfast, at a tent by the side of the road, I was better but could not eat. My map revealed that the pass we had crossed, at the peak of my misery, was the Abra Huashhuaccasa, at 14,107 feet.
By midmorning we were in Abancay, I was no longer quaking or thinking of death; I remember the town vividly. We pulled over and, while waiting for a taxi driver friend of Lyda’s to load his car with her grapes, all had tea and rolls. Lyda paid Sebastián a flete, or cargo fee, of 120 soles (US$35). Flirtatiously, he told her he’d pick her up anytime.
“I’ll stay with you,” she said, “until a better ride comes along!” He held up to the light the 100-soles bill she had given him, reflexively checking to see if it was counterfeit.
We talked about our families (all of us were fathers—I have two children, Sebastián three, Edgardo four), about Machu Picchu (neither of them had been there; I had), and about a festival near Abancay in which villagers tied a condor, representing Andean culture, to the back of a bull, representing the Spanish, and cheered while the giant bird pecked savagely at the bull and the bull, leaping in pain, tried to stop it. They couldn’t recommend a hotel in Cuzco for me—that was expensive tourist stuff. They just slept in the truck.
At dusk a few hours later we had reached the bustling little city of Cuzco, onetime center of the Inca empire, and the oldest inhabited town in the Americas. It was as far as our truck could go; eastbound freight would get transferred to smaller trucks. That was true of me as well, so Sebastián and Edgardo dropped me on the edge of town, where I would get a cab. I tipped them and waited to see if they’d hold the bills up to the light (they did not). I spent the next few days in the old capital recovering from altitude sickness and preparing for the next part of my journey.
Cuzco, the gateway to Machu Picchu, is still a place where roads meet, but four hundred years ago it was a very different kind of nexus.
The Inca road system was huge, extending from Quito, Ecuador, in the north past the present location of Santiago, Chile, in the south. Cuzco sat astride the more important and mountainous of two main north-south routes, the other one coastal, and many links joined the two routes. The 14,000-mile network, if placed in Africa, would extend from Cape Town, South Africa, to the south of France.
European chroniclers of the Inca likened their road system to that of the Roman Empire. The Spanish conquistador-chronicler Cieza de León wrote of the portion that went from Cuzco up to present-day Quito:
In human memory I believe that there is no account of a road as great as this, running through deep valleys, high mountains, banks of snow, torrents of water, living rock, and wild rivers. Through some places it went flat and paved; it was excavated into precipices and cut through rock in the mountains; it passed with walls along rivers, and had steps and resting spots in the snow. In all places it was clean and swept free of refuse, with lodgings, storehouses, Sun temples, and posts along the route. Oh! Can anything similar be claimed for Alexander or any of the powerful kings who ruled the world, that they were able to build such a road or provide the supplies found on it?
Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian historian and scientist (and a traveler not given to hyperbole), called the roads “among the most useful and stupendous works ever executed by man.” Hernando Pizarro, one of the conquistador brothers, wrote, “The road through the mountains is something to see, because in truth, nothing in Christendom equals it.” And indeed, it is mainly the mountain roads that have endured, because so many of them, like Roman roads, were cut from stone.
One doesn’t need to venture far from Cuzco to appreciate the unique character of these roads: the Inca Trail, a high-altitude, three-to four-day walking path to Machu Picchu with hundreds of stone steps chiseled into steep valley walls, is part of the origi
nal network. Unlike other roads, earlier and later, the Inca roads were not made for wheeled vehicles, for the Inca had not discovered the wheel. The roads of other cultures might be thought of as evolving from footpaths for people, to trails for pack animals, and then finally to tracks for horse-drawn carriages and motor vehicles. As roads evolved they emphasized gentle gradients and turns, and prized straightaways: they tried to accommodate increased velocity. This was not the case with Inca roads. They were intended to accommodate people on foot and the agile Andean beast of burden, the llama.
The Spaniards’ horses had considerable trouble with the mountain roads. In his classic Conquest of Peru, William H. Prescott recounts how on Pizarro’s march to Cuzco, “the mountain was hewn into steps, but the rocky ledges cut up the hoofs of the horses; and, though the troopers dismounted and led them by the bridle, they suffered severely in their effort to keep their footing.”
Other roads were vested with symbolic meanings difficult for us to understand. In parts of the Andes some stone paths are nearly one hundred feet wide. These were apparently not for common passage; they crossed lands that had been conquered by the Inca tribe and were a symbol of the Incan state, their use apparently restricted to those on state business. Commonly, local people were forced to do road work as part of the mita system of forced communal labor. One sixteenth-century chronicler described how Emperor Atahualpa and his retinue entered the plaza of the city of Cajamarca: “There were in front of him many Indians who cleaned the road in spite of the fact that it was rather clean and there was nothing to pick up.”