by Jan Morris
And most of all you will know the pressure of La Paz if you visit the high Indian quarters after dark. They tumble and straggle dustily upon the hillside, and at night they are tumultuous with activity. It is not a noisy sort of energy – it has a padded, hushed insinuation to it – but it is tremendously purposeful and intent. Crouching along every alley are the indefatigable street-sellers, huddled about some hissing brazier, or sprawling, a confusion of skirts, shawls and babies, behind their stalls of mandarins. Hundreds of candles illuminate the pavement counters; beneath a multitude of canvas awnings, the Indians eat their thick stews or sip their coca tea; outside each dark and balconied courtyard, the caravanserais of La Paz, the lorries are preparing for the dawn journey – down to the steaming Yungas for tropical fruits and jungle vegetables, across the Altiplano for the fabulous rainbow trout of Titicaca.
The scene is shadowy and cluttered, and you cannot always make out the detail as you push through the crowd; but the impression it leaves is one of ceaseless, tireless energy, a blur of strange faces and sinewy limbs, a haze of ill-understood intentions, a laugh from a small Mongol in dungarees, a sudden stink from an open drain, a cavalcade of tilted bowlers in the candlelight – and above it all, so clear, so close that you confuse the galaxies with the street lamps, the wide blue bowl of the Bolivian sky and the brilliant cloudless stars of the south.
But here is an odd thing. When you come to La Paz from the north, over the escarpment, it seems a very prodigy among cities; but if you drive away from it towards Illimani and the south, looking back over your shoulder as you cross the last ridge, why, all the magic has drained from it, all the colour has faded, all that neurosis seems an illusion, and it looks like some drab old mining camp, sluttish among the tailings.
Lima
The capital of Peru evidently gave a disturbing jolt to my conscience, and made me sound (just for once) like a proper Guardian reporter.
In Peru you can smell misery, and you need not sniff too hard. Behind Lima, where the arid Andean foothills slouch down towards the sea, there is a hill called San Cristóbal, crowned with a cross of pilgrimage, that commands a famous view of the capital. Splendidly below you lies the City of the Kings, huddled beneath its winter vapours: the gorgeous golden suburbs of San Isidro and Miraflores, the inevitable skyscrapers of the city centre, the towers and plazas and rambling old palaces that made this capital of the Viceroys, for two legendary centuries, the first city of the western hemisphere. Immediately at your feet, however, clustered on the hillside like some nightmare belvedere, there is a quarter very different. Magnificently sited upon that eminence, ironically surveying the grandeur of the prospect, squats a slum so festering, so filthy, so toad-like, so bestially congested, so utterly devoid of water, light, health or comfort, so deep in garbage and excrement, so swarming with scabbed ragged barefoot children, so reeking with squalor that just to wander through its alleys makes you retch into your handkerchief. From these unspeakable stews the stench of degradation rises, veiling the City of the Kings in a kind of haze, and even eddying around the cross on top of the hill.
Lima is ringed by such fearful barriaras. Perhaps a quarter of a million people live in them, in a city of 1.2 million, and nowhere in the world have I experienced quite so distressingly the gulf between the immensely rich and the unbelievably poor, with almost nothing homely in the middle – no diligent allotment-gardeners, no chug of second-hand lawnmower, hardly a china seagull winging it across high tea. Peru presents all the stock symptoms of reaction: absentee landlords, enormous semi-feudal estates, widespread illiteracy, political irresponsibility, intricate meshworks of financial interest, snobbery, sophistry, indulgence, ostentation. The symbolism of San Cristóbal is dead accurate. For generations the City of the Kings was as effectively insulated against its bleak hinterland as ever was old St Petersburg: but misery has crept up on it, the penniless Indians and half-castes have swarmed in from the countryside, and today, to the impressionable foreigner if not to the leggy girls on the society pages, it is no longer the grand old churches or the jacaranda gardens that express the meaning of Lima, but the slums at the back of your mind.
The country does not feel on the brink of a convulsion, but it feels as though somewhere far away, in a remote fastness of the Altiplano, perhaps, or in some cell or chamber more distant still, a dampish fuse has begun to smoulder. For this Peru has nobody to blame, as I see it, but her rulers. If ever a revolution does come to Peru, and the proud patricians of Lima are humbled with violence and degradation, they can kick nobody but their own scented selves. Today they are, I am told, reluctantly awakening if not to altruism, at least to self-interest: but by their history, their heedlessness, their vulgar opulence and their exclusivity, they have marvellously qualified themselves for the garrotte.
You will therefore forgive, I hope, a crude and perhaps hasty conclusion from a true-blue British traditionalist. The other day I drove direct from the hideous purlieus of San Cristóbal to have tea at the Country Club in San Isidro. The odour of the slum went with me, clinging to my jacket and the soles of my shoes like some blasphemous travesty of incense, and as I sat there among the little black dresses and the sticky cakes, the greying distinctions and the foppish playboys, the starched nannies and the exquisite children on the lawn, the chic and the cultivation and the chitchat of urbanity – as I sat there with the squalor still in my hair I could not help remembering, Pharisaical though it seems in retrospect, Dr Johnson’s celebrated differentiation: I smell, you stink.
Cuzco
Today everybody knows about Cuzco, in Peru: in 1961 I had never heard of it.
Out of a mountain in Peru fifteen llamas sway down an ancient road, silently pursued by a man in a poncho and knee breeches and a woman wearing a white straw hat, a blazing flurry of petticoats, and a baby-hammock on her back. The man is chewing an opiate wad of the coca leaf, the woman is planning to request the intercession of the Lord of the Earthquakes, whose miraculous figure in the town below is known to sweat in sympathy and weep real tears of compassion.
To the north an elderly American locomotive, with a cow-catcher and an old wail of a whistle, is plunging zig-zag into the valley with a string of cattle-trucks. From the south a clanging of cracked bells rings out of a florid campanile. And as those travellers swing round the last dusty corner, with a soft shuffle of bare feet and padded cameloid hoofs, there below them they see, clear-cut in that Alpine sunshine, the capital of the Land of the Four Quarters.
It could only be Cuzco, a little city of such supreme interest and historical symbolism, of such variety and punch, that in the context of the South American Grand Tour it combines the compulsions of a Stonehenge, a small Barcelona, and a Katmandu. It lies at 11,000 feet in the Peruvian Altiplano, and to reach it from Lima you fly breathtakingly across the Andes in an unpressurized aircraft, nibbling an oxygen tube like a hookah: but its valley is green, the hills around it are as fresh and springy as English downland, and only the testy pumping of your heart at night, and the celestial supervision of the snow peaks, remind you that on the other side of the world the ski-slopes of St Moritz are 5,000 feet lower than your hotel.
Five centuries ago this remote and barricaded place, somewhere between Lake Titicaca and the dreadful Amazon jungle, was the capital of the Incan Empire, the brilliant but baleful organism, part refulgent aristocracy, part deadening discipline, that extended its power over most of the Andean territories, commanding an area as large as France, Switzerland, Italy, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg all reluctantly put together.
Here the mummified Inca emperors, all entrails sucked out, sat flecked by fly-whisks down the decades in the glittering Temple of the Sun. Here the Chosen Women span their incomparable textiles in imperial virginity, here the ferocious Inca generals marshalled their armies, here the diviners interpreted the intestines of their guinea-pigs, the priests prepared their intoxicated victims for the sacrifice, the marvellous Inca surgeons performed their prodigies of trepanning, am
putation and excision.
In the fifteenth century Cuzco was the heart of a civilization so strange, precise and rarefied that nothing remotely like it has even been seen again. The little city was the core of it all – the very name of Cuzco means ‘navel’ – and everywhere in the town you can still feel the presence of the Incas. Often it is vulgarized in tourism and profit, in Incaland souvenirs, costume jewellery of weird exoticism, schoolgirl vestals with lamps and improbable headdresses at folklore festivals. More essentially, though, it is perpetuated in the massive masonry that still forms, to this very day, the ground layer of Cuzco: vast and impeccably chiselled stonework, like the craft of meticulous giants, with queer unexpected angles and corners of daunting exactitude – the whole looking so new and so contrived that it reminds me of the building material known in England as ‘reconstructed stone’.
The basis of the Temple of the Sun remains marvellously rounded beneath a church, and so does the wall of the House of the Chosen Women. There are sacred Inca snakes still above a doorway, and sacred Inca sanctuaries still in a cloister, and brooding above the city stands the enigmatic fortress called Sacsahuamán, incorporating some of the largest chunks of stone ever raised into dubious utility by the ingenuity of man. But all this terrifying structure Pizarro toppled, with no other weapons but bigotry, guts, greed and gunpowder: and on the prostrate capital of the Incas, sans Emperor, sans Chosen Women, sans soothsayers and all, the Spaniards built themselves a second city, dedicated to a very different version of the Sun God.
Gilded, ornate, candle-flickering, snobbish, refulgent with Christian miracles and the titles of grandees, with arches and bell-towers and graceful plazas, with songs from Andalusia and Moorish doors and sizzling coquettes and silver tabernacles – there the Spaniards’ Cuzco stands today, triumphant still above the Inca engineers. They called it The Very Noble and Great City of Cuzco, the Most Principal and Head of Kingdoms of Peru, and deep among the canyons of the Peruvian Andes it remains a paradoxical memorial to the virility of Europe.
Returned to its origins it might not be remarkable, but in this utterly alien setting, high on the continental divide, Spanish Cuzco really smacks, as its old divines would wish it, of the miraculous. Fretted, solemn and domineering are the churches that stand around the Plaza de Armas – the dark but glistening cathedral, the arrogant church of the Jesuits, the gloomy shrine of Jesus and Mary beside the Hall of the Inquisition, the aloof Church of the Triumph from which, in 1536, Our Lady emerged with the Christ Child in her arms to disconcert an Indian rebellion. Elaborate and delectable are the mansions of the old magnificos, with their dazzling gardens glimpsed through crooked doorways, their dripping pitchers of flowers, their crested balconies and suggestions of silken solace.
Nearly every corner has its hint of Spanish pride, but the Spaniards do not dominate Cuzco today, for all the flourish of their architecture, and nor do the vanished Incas. Cuzco today is mostly run by mestizos, half-castes of Spanish and Indian cross, but all its living colour and verve is provided by the fuller blooded Quechua Indians of the countryside. Sometimes they look like gypsies; sometimes, in their trailing skirts, like Navajo Indians from Arizona; sometimes, with their tall white hats and shawls, like ladies out of Borrow’s wilder Wales; but to me they usually seem, and sound, and smell, and move like Sherpas out of the Himalayas – less carefree perhaps, less hearty certainly, but still instinct with dung-fires and potatoes, smoky dark interiors, sweat, untanned leather, back-breaking labour, poverty, superstition, resilience, and the viscous alcohol that is brewed in these parts by fermenting maize in women’s saliva.
They are all over Cuzco, prostrate before the Lord of the Earthquakes like Tibetans in a tinkling temple, or hastening barefoot through the night, down the shadows of a cobbled alley, bent double with loads of straw. Away in the desolate expanses of the Altiplano the Indians of Peru are usually demoralized, I am assured, often destitute, sometimes actually starving. You would not know it in Cuzco. Their presence is possibly a little wan, but still earthy. Their children are so adorable that I would happily adopt half a dozen myself. Their women, strolling thick-set through the tumbled market in their rakish hats and flounces, spinning their wool as they walk, look to me as though only an ounce of opportunity, only a dram of education, only a year of square meals would release resources of wonderful strength and character. Their menfolk, half-doped as they are by coca, malnutrition, and the degradation of centuries, look as though nothing on earth, from a hostile omen to the most atrocious of hangovers, could deter them from the endless dull drudgery of their lives.
Undoubtedly the Indians win, in this Most Principal and Head of Kingdoms of Peru. Beside them the half-castes look upstart, and the Lima gentry doomed. It will be a long, long time before they come into their own again – if indeed they ever do; but when I run my mind’s eye back over the Cuzco scene, away from the snakes above the doorway, away from the smoke-darkened Lord of the Earthquakes, past the campaniles and the fortress on the hill and the puffing wailing train, in the end it rests again on those distant figures on the Inca road, the fifteen lolloping llamas, the man with the plug of coca in his cheek, the barefoot woman in the bright but dusty petticoats, and the infinitesimal baby Quechua on her back, so swaddled in textiles that only one brown pondering eye shows through the muffles, jogging eternally out of the Andes.
12
Oxford 1965
Half-way through the decade I wrote a book about Oxford. I treated the city and its university as though, considered together, they offered a kind of a paradigm of contemporary England as a whole; but it was really the ancient individualism of the university, threatened as it was by changing styles, values and loyalties, that chiefly interested me.
In some ways Oxford University is a gigantic quirk, always out of step with the times. This infuriates those who prize logic above independence, just as the emergence of industry in Oxford offends those who like a city to be all of a piece, all academic or all commercial, all black or lily-white.
The most notorious symbol of Oxford syncopation is All Souls, the all-male graduate college in High Street, which is evil in some people’s minds as a seed-bed of Chamberlain’s appeasement in the 1930s, and despicable in others as an appalling waste of academic resource. All Souls is theoretically an institute of advanced studies, except that a substantial minority of its sixty or so Fellows need not actually study. They need not do anything at all, indeed, though they are mildly expected to dine in college sometimes and sleep in the bed that awaits them there. Some forty Fellows of All Souls are university academics, some of them professors. Others are young researchers who have won their place in an atrociously difficult examination. Most of the rest, holding different categories of fellowship, only appear at weekends, when they come down from London full of metropolitan gossip and stocked with the expertise of a dozen professions.
No event in Europe can be much sillier, not the most footling country frolic or pointless Anatolian orgy, than the Ceremony of the Mallard at this college – which only takes place every hundred years, to be sure, but is vividly remembered in between. It seems that when they were building All Souls, in the fifteenth century, a mallard duck flapped out of a drain beside its foundations, and this bird has been inexplicably honoured ever since. Once in every hundred years the Fellows, after a good dinner, seize staves and swords and go looking for its shade, led by a Lord Mallard in a sedan chair, with a dead duck on a pole – up to the roof in the middle of the night, doubtless drunk as so many owls by now, their voices thundering across Radcliffe Square, their torches flickering in the sky, until at last they return to their common room in the small hours, drink a final potation laced with duck’s blood, and let the bird lie for another century.
For myself, I would like to see All Souls preserving its fastidious privileged character, but packed in every room with eager full-time scholars – the most high-powered, as well as the most sumptuous, of all graduate colleges. The traditional theory is, though
, that the give-and-take of thought and controversy, passed week by week across its old oak tables, is itself a sort of English lubricant, fructifying the national life, bridging the gaps between professions, and worth preserving in itself as a late survivor of an old, carefree, valeted England.
Oxford University as a whole, to a less pickled degree, cherishes the same intentions. This is a university still on its own, still half aloof to change. It has tried to adapt an aristocratic tradition to an egalitarian age, and though to the sympathetic observer this generally looks admirable, if a little forlorn, to the critic it is often simply arrogant. Trade unionists, visiting this city for summer conferences, sometimes suggest to outraged college porters that the whole place ought to be blown up, allowing the Ministry of Education to start again from scratch; and the leitmotiv of criticism against Oxford, which never ceases, is the university’s sense of antique superiority – the feeling that, for all its enlightened poses, it only caters for the upper half of the nation, and gives its alumni unfair advantages in life.
Most of it, though, is the wrong end of a stick – a misunderstanding of the gravelly evasiveness of the place, which is only a mask for its tolerance and its fine distrust of sameness (exasperating though it is going to be, for anyone living near Radcliffe Square on the night of All Souls’ Day, 2001, when the Fellows clamber up there again behind the Lord Mallard, stamping among the chimney-pots and carrying on about that confounded duck). It is as though a separate little world exists in this city, with its own private time-scale, and in a way this is true: for the Oxford we have been inspecting represents a civilization that is almost gone. Try though you may to see this city as a whole, still the factories and the housing estates feel like intruders upon some ancient preserve. All that is most remarkable about Oxford, setting it apart from other towns, or from other universities, comes from the lost order of the English – essentially a patrician society, stable, tolerant, amateur, confident enough to embrace an infinite variety within a rigid framework. The English gentleman dominates Oxford: not in the flesh, for he has almost vanished from the scene, but in the lingering spirit of the place.