A Writer's World (22 page)

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, amputation 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.

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.

Another England has emerged now, and Oxford is adapting to it, learning to live with the motor plants and the traffic, trying to keep up with the times. There is nothing pathetic to this city, and the new Oxford will doubtless be just as self-satisfied as the old. But as you contemplate its condition now it is as though you are watching the envoi to a majestic play. The great trees planted in the heyday of the English landscape gardeners are now past their prime, and will soon be toppling, and the island character of the English is waning, too, as the wider civilization of the West takes over. Soon it will survive only in the history: but we are not too late, and Oxford stands there still to remind us of its faults and virtues – courageous, arrogant, generous, ornate, pungent, smug and funny.

When you arrive at Darwin, your landfall in Australia, you are given a form to complete for the Customs, and satisfyingly bush-whacking are its demands. Have you any dangerous weapons, like spring-blade knives, daggers, bludgeons, coshes, knuckle-dusters or swordsticks? Are you carrying any saddles, bridles or horse rugs? Are there horns or hoofs in your baggage, dried blood, feathers, germ cultures or microbes? Are you accompanied by insects in any stage of development?

Thus you are pre-conditioned to Darwin, for this is a town that prides itself upon its frontier manners, its horse-rug flavour, its traditions of bludgeon, horn and hoof, the weird animal life that leaps and wallows about it, kangaroo to buffalo, crocodile to dingo. Never did a town greet its visitors more boisterously. Never did the beer flow quite so fast. Nowhere is the traveller treated with such an easy, lolloping, happy-go-lucky, careless and gregarious courtesy. As an introduction to Australia, Darwin is a work of art, for here, carefully fashioned by climate, custom and inclination, is a mosaic of all the reputed Australian virtues, from the instant accessibility of the biggest swell to the determined golden faces of the barmaids. (‘But don’t judge it all by this place,’ its genial citizenry will assure you. ‘There’s nowhere else in the whole bloody continent like the Top End.’)

The Top End: Darwin stands at the very extremity of Australia’s Northern Territory, on the shore of the Timor Sea, scarcely a gun-shot
from Indonesia and linked with the distant south only by the long lonely road to Alice Springs – ‘The Track’, as they fondly call it, or ‘The Bitumen’. Immediately behind Darwin there begins one of the world’s most fearful wildernesses, all desert and dry scrub from here to Adelaide. It is almost exactly a thousand miles to Alice, the next town of any size. Even the railway peters out three hundred miles to the south, and the Darwin telephone district is bounded east west by areas that have, as the directory blandly tells you, no telephones at all. This is an isolated tropical town, twelve degrees south of the equator, blazing and humid in the Australian summer, caressingly warm in July. It is all on its own at the Top End, very fond indeed of its own company, but sometimes uncomfortably aware that several hundred million Asians live in crowded indigence just across the water.

You must not envisage it a Pacific paradise, all palm-fringed and zephyr-blown. Arnhem Land, this bump in the forehead of Australia, is a tough and unlovely place, clad in scrub jungle, with mangrove swamps at the water’s edge and a flat monotonous bushland around. Thirty years ago, I am told, this was a whole-hog frontier port, gambling dens, molls, Chinatown and all. Today it is much more respectable. Its principal purpose is government, for it is the administrative centre of the Northern Territory, and some 60 per cent of its people are civil servants. They live in trim uniform government houses, they honour all the hierarchical rules of civil servants everywhere, and they multiply, so the locals say, faster than jack-rabbits. The chief import of Darwin, according to a local proverb, is civil servants: the chief export is empty beer bottles.

But if 60 per cent of the people are conventional enough, the other 40 per cent are marvellously free-and-easy. If Darwin has self-service stores, espresso bars and used-car lots, it also retains some spirited echoes of its roistering days, and many reminders that down the road there still stands an empty continent. The saloon bars are full of handsome sprawling young men in shorts; prickly longshoremen with beer on their breath still lounge around the docks; sometimes a splendid rangy cattleman strides into the Darwin Hotel, with his wide-brimmed hat and his patrician air; and just occasionally one may see in a store one of those tight-lipped taciturn women, in faded floral prints and curlers, who are traditionally the helpmeets of pioneers.

With one eye always cocked towards Asia, Darwin has long since outgrown its racial prejudices. You may observe its tolerant proliferation best on Saturday evening, during the interval at the Smith Street picture house,
when the audience pours out to its Cokes and ice-creams in the neighbouring milk bars. This is a people of astonishing variety: black, brown and yellow, Italianate and Chinese, gleaming aborigines, half-castes, women who look like Californians and men who look like gigantic Dutchmen. Up here the notion of White Australia seems ludicrous indeed, and there is nothing strait-laced or loftily Nordic in the air. The illegitimacy rate is extremely high, miscegenation is as old as Arnhem Land, and Smith Street on such an evening fizzes with an almost Brazilian gusto.

Binding all this community together, though, stamping its character, providing the cast for the crucible, is the Australian as we have always thought of him, still recognizably British, and one of the very best and most likeable men on the face of the earth. Here you may see him at his most confident, on the edge of the great Outback. He may be of any age, this ‘dinkum Aussie’, descended from convicts or new-arrived from Newcastle. He may be a humdrum bank clerk, or a prospector driven wildly in from his shack in the wilderness, to squander his money on drink and loose living – ‘riding the vaudeville’, as an old fossicker described the process to me. Whoever he is, he is magnificent to meet: as free a spirit as you can find in the world today, shackled by no inhibition of class or disadvantage, with little sense of thrift and still less of decorum, no agonizing reserve, no envy, no contempt, no meanness. He is like some splendid English working man relieved of the burden of the centuries, strengthened and cleansed by the southern sun, and allowed to begin history all over again.

Of course there are blemishes to such a reincarnation. The brewery jokes soon stale, and the beeriness of life itself sometimes borders upon the bestial. For myself I find those steely golden barmaids something less than alluring, and I resent the laboured bandying of my Christian name – ‘Nice to know you, Jim’ – as though I were participating in a television quiz show. There is a certain air of middlingness to the place, like a boom town without a boom, or perhaps an army without any officers. Darwin does not feel to me a place of spectacular promise, an embryo San Francisco: it is growing all the time, but it remains, after many a long decade of settlement, and many a million gallons of beer down its collective throat, still a small and undistinguished town.

Nevertheless it is a fine introduction to Australia – something fresh, and new, and crackling. It is always alive, always laughing, always full of tall stories and improbable characters, always drinking, always ready to help. The visiting Briton can scarcely help feeling a dude in such a setting, but
for myself I respond all too easily to these tolerant and spendthrift philosophies. Perhaps it is some hereditary instinct in the blood, that makes me feel at home and at ease in this wide unfamiliar landscape. Perhaps it is the old yearning of the islander for horizons less cramped, skies less smoky. It may not seem likely, when you hear my effete voice diffidently requesting a second pineapple juice across the bar, but by golly, give me a four-wheel drive and a good bush-woman, and I may well go walk-about myself.

Sydney is a harbour, with a bridge across it that everyone knows by sight, and a city around it that nobody can quite envisage. The origins of Sydney are unsavoury, its history is disagreeable to read, its temper is coarse, its organization seems to be slipshod, its suburbs are hideous and its politics often crooked, its buildings are mostly plain, its voices rasp on the ear, its trumpeted Art Movement is, I suspect, half spurious, its newspapers are either dull or distasteful, and in the end, when you hunger for beauty or consolation in this famous place, you return willy-nilly to the harbour-front, where the ships tread with graceful care towards their moorings, and the great humped bridge stands like an arbiter above the quays.

Harsh words for a stranger to utter, but then there was never a harsher contrast than the disparity between Sydney and its setting. This harbour is not, to my mind, so beautiful as its popularly nominated peers, Rio, Hong Kong and San Francisco, but it is still exceedingly lovely, and to stand upon North Head on a crisp sunshine afternoon, with a swell rolling in from the South Pacific and an idle flurry of yachts beyond Bradley’s Head – to stand at the gateway of Sydney on such an afternoon is among the classic experiences of travel: such an ineffable antipodean blue is the sky above you, so unexpected and inviting are the countless coves and fjords of the harbour, so imperturbably do the tankers sweep out to sea, so silent and lordly are the warships in Athol Bay, so grand but monstrous does the crook-back of the bridge protrude above the promontories. It is a San Francisco that such an environment deserves, and sometimes indeed
the anxious traveller will find himself reminded of that celestial seaport. He will see affinities in the winter mists, the clap of the water at the end of every vista, the cool green gardens of The Domain above Wooloomooloo, the villas poised so delectably on their cliffsides above the harbour. He will taste, if he meets the right Sydney people, the same careful but seldom humourless diligence, the same meticulous interest in a brief past, comparable cheerful clubs, and, among the cramped espresso bars of King’s Cross, similar wayward but resolute Bohemians. Pinchgut Island, with its stone fortress and its dismal recollections, will remind him of Alcatraz, and the bustle of the boats at the Circular Quay, as the Manly Ferry sails away to a tinkle of its resident piano and a quaver of its mendicant violin, may seem a distant homespun echo of Fisherman’s Wharf.

This is, though, a San Francisco sadly
manqué
, just as Dorman Long’s fine bridge, however sensible and sturdy, is a lumpish substitute for the Golden Gate. Sydney is not one of your absolute cities, and in nothing that I have detected, except perhaps the racing commentaries, is it quite in the first class. It is almost as old as San Francisco, indeed, and bigger than all but a handful of European capitals, but there is something cold and vacuous at its core, something that makes the stranger, however hospitable his acquaintances, feel obscurely lonely in its streets. For most Sydney citizens the purpose of life may perhaps be summarized in the parade of the life-savers on Manly Beach, all bronzed open-air fun on Saturday afternoons, and perhaps it is this paucity of purpose, this lack of lofty memories or intentions, that makes this metropolis feel so pallid or frigid at the soul.

This, and what seems to be a shortage of kindness. The people of Sydney will usually greet you warmly enough, even heartily, but compared with the great immigrant cities of the New World, Montreal, New York or São Paulo, this place feels cruelly aloof. Perhaps it is the origins of Sydney that invoke this sensation – for despite the sophistries of its society ladies, it was founded by the scum of England only six generations ago. Perhaps it is the expressions on the faces of those ladies themselves, so steely, scornful and accusatory, as though they are expecting you (which Heaven forbid) to offer them an improper suggestion. Perhaps it is the intolerance of one citizen to another, sour bus conductor to irritable passenger, cross-patch waitress to graceless customer. Sydney does not feel like a haven. It does not reach out, as New York once did, to receive ‘your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’. No great ideals of politics or humanity animate its visions, but only starker impulses of self-advancement or survival.

Nor does it even feel content. It seems full of reproach, sneer and grumble. The immigrant from Europe or England all too often feels resented. The dinkum Aussie all too often seems to cherish racial prejudices of the nastiest kind. The sleazy bars of the place, looking like public lavatories and smelling of slopped beer, exude no genial good cheer, but only a mindless and sometimes rather frightening sense of male collusion. A proud new bridge collapsed in Melbourne while I was in Australia, but the Sydney
Daily
Telegraph
, in its editorial on the matter, offered not a breath of sympathy, nor even a kindly joke, but only a column of crude and spiteful mockery. The people of Sydney like to think of themselves as a ‘weird mob’, but they strike me as weird not in any free-and-easy gallivanting way, but only in a sort of twisted uncertainty and isolation. I blush even to consider the numberless exceptions to these hasty generalizations: all the kind and cultivated people who do live in Sydney, all the patient Dutch waiters and merry Italian stevedores, all the charming dons up at the University, all the scholarly attendants at the Public Library, many a jolly taxi-driver and many a thoughtful bookseller, the courteous attendants at the State Parliament, the splendid ferry-captains who stride so grandly, like admirals on a quarter-deck, from one wheelhouse to the other when their boat turns round. The brave new Opera House plan is perhaps a foretaste of more stylish things to come, and each year the influx of Europeans rubs a little elegance into this raw city, and a little gentleness too. Some of the new skyscrapers, though scarcely breathtaking, are handsome enough. Some of the new highways breathe the dash and dazzle one expects of such a young and explosive port.

Even so, Sydney does not yet feel a great city – not a generous, confident, serene city, not a city of any warmth and splendour. Turn your back on the bridge and you will travel through a wilderness of peevish suburbs, a labyrinth of unlovely boulevards, a humdrum desolation, until at last you reach the outskirts of the place, and before you, if you persevere, stretches the emptiness of Australia, which is inescapable, which runs like some chill virus through the bloodstream of this country, and so binds the fragile years together that even now you may sense the presence of the chain-gangs in Sydney, and fancy the punishment cutter striking out to Pinchgut.