Cloud Road (14 page)

I would now mix my methods of travel, walking the best sections of Inca road, bussing the rest. Over the next few days, I took buses through southern Ecuador into Peru, and the city of Piura on the coastal plain. The city has been moved several times, without improving it. I felt strangely unsettled as I looked about me in the gathering dusk, watching the turkey vultures glide over the roofs. It wasn’t because of the bustle and hustle of a frontier town, nor the money changers on the street, whose eyes glowed at the sight of a westerner. It wasn’t the stultifying, humid heat after the cool of the mountains, which the dusk was not abating, nor the cacophony of car horns. I escaped the pandemonium by walking onto the San Miguel pedestrian bridge, over the wide green-brown river, whose reek of a week-dead horse was relieved by boundless clouds of
neo-tropical
cormorants whose ski-landings made the turgid water dance. Here and there, among the dark flocks of fish-fat bodies, were delicate snowy egrets, and a single great egret, tall as a heron: a sinuous white dagger. I realised what was gnawing at me when I could see out of the town and into the fields. I had the sensation that someone had been holding me up, by a hand on my chest, but now they had taken their hand away, and I was falling. They were gone: the mountains that had walled my life for two months were far out of sight beyond the heat haze. There was nothing to make the eye stop; just this smouldering metallic sky plunging down unimpeded to the sweltering plains.

Piura was the first city founded in South America by Francisco Pizarro, and was the base for his conquest of
Peru. I walked to the Plazoleta Pizarro to look at his statue, and his coat of arms, bearing the golden chains with which he subdued the Incas. I was in a low mood. I had started taking anti-malarial pills; the hot coastal lowlands are more malarial than the Amazon. As always, they gave me unsettling dreams. Last night, I had been caught cheating at Maths A-level.

The faces in the streets were far more Hispanic than in the Sierra. The coastal natives were practically exterminated by the Spanish Conquest. They had lived in isolated river valleys separated by seas of desert sand, and their agriculture needed social organisation to maintain large-scale irrigation. The Incas understood this, and absorbed these small nations without serious disruption. But the impact of the Spanish was calamitous. They ignored how the wealth they looted had been made. Irrigation was neglected, the populations hauled off to fight, to be poisoned in the gold and silver mines, or simply used as beasts of burden. In 1500 there were nearly a million people living on the coasts of Peru and Ecuador; by 1630 there were just 75,000.

The road south-east to Chiclayo crossed 130 miles of the Sechura Desert. To avoid the worst of the heat I took the dawn bus. Two miles outside Piura, the bus was running across a fertile, agricultural plain of flat green fields. Palm trees lined the irrigation ditches, and a donkey rested in the shafts of a wooden-wheeled cart, motionless, hoping it would be forgotten. An egret, patrolling the pool of a stream, froze into a white hieroglyph, splashed with a butter-yellow beak. We passed rich cane and cotton plantations. I could have been in Egypt; but the workers, bent double, sun-stunned
scarecrows in the light-drenched fields, wore western clothes. On their heads, no turbans, but white hoods, like Capuchin friars. The line between the irrigated green and the dust of the desert was so abrupt that one end of a donkey could chew the crop while the other fertilised the desert.

Cotton was a native plant, and sugar cane an imported one. Both were luxury items in Europe when Latin America and the Caribbean were being colonised. Europe’s cotton came overland from China and the Near East, with middlemen hiking the prices all the long way. In Peru, by contrast, cotton was the staple cloth of the coast, and they could weave it so finely you could not see the threads: the Spanish mistook it for silk. When it was used as a religious offering, the Incas regarded it as equal in value to a llama. There were storehouses filled to the rafters with such cloth. The looms that made it were credited with a life of their own. In eclipses, they had to be protected to stop them turning into bears or pumas, while the spindles might hiss and turn into snakes.

On Columbus’s second voyage, in 1493, he brought from the Canary Islands the plant that would enrich a few and impoverish and enslave many: sugar cane. Sugar was so precious in Europe that it was included in rich women’s dowries, itemised alongside their money and jewels. Diego de Mora first planted it in Peru as early as 1540, and the Peruvian coast proved the perfect environment to cultivate it. The labour was supplied by a system devised by the Spanish elsewhere. The spoils of conquest did not confer title to own land, but they included the use of the land, and the right to the labour of all the natives living on it. The natives did not make good plantation slaves, and,
worse, in Spain lawyers were agitating to constrain the excesses being committed on the natives. The great champion of the natives was the man after whom the school at Salasaca was named, where I had spoken to the boys in ancient Bolivian dress. He was Bartolomé de Las Casas, and he was the son of the adventurer Pedro de las Casas, who had sailed over with Columbus and his sugar cane. Aged eighteen, the son sailed to the New World in 1502, and witnessed the conquest of Cuba, then spent time in Venezuela and Mexico. The horrors he saw there, in the name of Spain and God, made him a priest, lawyer and campaigner until his death aged ninety-two. Yet he began as an estate-owner with feudal serfs in Hispaniola, and was forty years old before he began his humanitarian campaigns. He met cynicism, even from the weary Indians, who told him if it meant they could avoid meeting Christians in heaven, they preferred to go to hell. Although the debate did not deliver liberty to the natives, it was remarkable that it happened at all. The distinction is often made that England sent religious conscientious objectors and well-born gentlemen to colonise North America, while Spain sent thugs and bastards to South America. But the English dissidents did nothing for the welfare of the natives, and the English gentlemen had no debate on human rights.

Opposing Las Casas, denying that the natives had rights, was Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, a man equally learned, and an expert on Aristotle. In a treatise of 1547, he argued, like Aristotle, that some men are slaves by nature. The debate was generally regarded as a draw, but Las Casas was a talented and well-connected schemer, and he won the politics. Sepúlveda’s works were suppressed
after Las Casas’s university friends condemned their doctrines as unsound.

But as far as the natives were concerned, the victory was as academic as the debate. Rights always took second place to revenue. Royal decrees on native rights arrived in Peru with memoranda advising when they could be ignored. Enforcement was weak and fitful. Las Casas also made an awful compromise. To prevent the extermination of the native Americans, he accepted the importation of African slaves to work in the plantations, a compromise he later bitterly regretted. Tens of thousands came and suffered. By 1636, slaves made up one-third of the population of Lima. Nuns from rich families even kept slaves in their convents.

I sneezed. The coach had filled with fine desert dust. The aisle was full of standing passengers. As the heat rose, they began to nod off, their lolling heads whipping them awake when the bus lurched. To my left the sun was sunk in a metallic socket. Vultures peeled up from the road, all angles, hooks and sprawling feathers against the soft walls of turbulent light. New settlements were springing up in this harshest of environments. The houses were just matting for the walls and ceiling. If it rains here, you don’t shelter, you stand outside and enjoy it. I had another dryness; tomorrow Elaine was flying out for a month. The day after she would be with me.

The bus turned into a boulevard lined with dust-drenched trees, and spilled us into the company yard. I bought a paper and walked to a hotel on the other side of the block. The wind blew the front door open. While I waited for the sad-faced man at reception to complete the ledger, I read the headline: ‘An Honest President Dies’.

‘Must be Belaunde,’ said the receptionist, ‘he’s the only one who ever left office poorer than he came.’

‘It is,’ I said. Old Belaunde was a rare breed in South America, and there was genuine mourning on the streets. The television showed queues snaking round many Lima blocks to pay their respects at his open coffin.

Cable TV! For the first time in two months I could listen to English-language television. I showered in real hot water and lay naked on the clean sheets watching the European film channel. After the
French Lieutenant’s Woman
and
Barry Lyndon,
I almost watched another, rather than stop the delicious brain massage of hearing English. But when
Halloween
5
started, I stopped. Too much culture will weaken you. It felt strange to be clean and neat, and to be
Señor
and not
Gringo
, and to blow ten dollars on a seafood meal and two glasses of wine.

I went to bed early, picturing Elaine by my side, but slept poorly: more exam trouble.

Elaine’s flight was due at one in the afternoon. I was an anxious teenager again, spending most of the morning trying not to go to the airport. In the market I bought an armful of red roses and gladioli, then found out the hotel didn’t own a vase. At the supermarket, I bought beer, wine and a large vase. The checkout girl nodded at the vase and said, ‘You’re thirsty.’

At the airport, one o’clock came and went. I watched air force pilots taxi jets out of low bunkers, wind the power up until the plane was kicking on its undercarriage, then
scream away, cutting the sky. Suddenly her plane was down and I could see her walking down the aircraft steps. She had a new haircut, new outdoor clothes and even a new body. She had been training in the gym for three months and had lost weight. Soon I was leaning over railings to hug her, while she waited for her luggage. My arms, now skinny, felt strange around her new muscles. She threw her hands wide and tilted her head back: ‘Sun!’ She looked fabulous. That night, after two months alone, I reached out to see if it was true: my mahogany fingers against her white back, the dark veins like contorted ivy on the backs of my hands. I stroked gently. ‘Tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I need sleep.’ To lie side by side and feel I should not touch was another kind of loneliness. Separations do not end simply because you both come to the same place.

There was a reason to meet in Chiclayo. In November 1986, three men sat in an ancient cemetery just inland from the town. One dashed his shovel to the ground in disgust. ‘Everyone’s been through these tombs, there’s nothing left.’ They looked at the ground, and listened to the breeze stealing through the cane fields, rustling the long leaves. A red glow moved from hand to hand, their last cigarette.

‘What about the pyramids?’ said one. ‘Work at night again, to keep the police off our backs.’

Next night they began a tunnel into the smaller mound of crumbled adobe bricks. Weeks went by, but they found little of value. Peru is one of the most thoroughly looted areas on the planet; the Spanish established a smelter in the Moche valley, even though there was no ore, solely to melt down the archaeology. The modern robbers began a
new pit near the summit, and burst into an untouched chamber. Breaking pots and throwing aside bones, they filled three sacks with rare items of gold, silver and copper.

Within days, a stream of high-quality artefacts flowed onto the market. Dealers in Lima began phoning each other. Were they real? Were they legal? Did anyone know where they had come from? One man did. He turned up at the police station. ‘I am one of the looters, the other two are cheating me.’ Two brothers were arrested. Much of the treasure had gone, but there were tantalising glimpses of what had been dispersed. The young Director of nearby Lambayeque Museum, Dr Walter Alva, bearded, with steel-rimmed spectacles, surveyed the objects laid out on the table at the police station. With great care, he examined each gold and silver ornament, the plates and bells of gilded copper. He recalls being stunned: ‘The workmanship surpassed anything yet discovered from the Moche culture. One look told me that all opinions on this civilisation were going to be rewritten.’

The police drove him to the pyramid where dozens of men, women and children were swarming over it with kitchen colanders and fly-screens, sieving for treasure. It took hours to persuade them to leave. This gift from their ancestors belonged to them, they argued, not to smart men in suits from the city. It required four policemen with machine guns on twenty-four-hour guard to keep them away. Dr Alva and his colleagues excavated the burial, but found little left intact. It was gutting to have missed so much by so little. In June, more objects began appearing in the Lima antique markets; the robbers had successfully hidden loot, and their families had started to sell it. Much was recouped.

The bus which bounced us down the baked earth road was basic even by Peruvian standards. Elaine winced: ‘I see you’re going to toughen me up quickly.’ Over the millennia, the level valley floor had been farmed
billiard-table
flat. As far as we could see, there was only one crop: sugar cane, bursting fifteen feet high. At the edges of the plantations, horses stood in meagre shade, bicycles were strewn in the grass and men, who had begun work in the dawn’s chill greyness, lay resting on the banks of irrigation ditches, pricking the blades of their machetes against the cushions of their thumb to test the edge. It is hard, uncomfortable work. They take the scratches, bites and infections for granted, and keep a sharp eye out for snakes. The bus filled with shy uniformed schoolchildren and their mothers. In one village a traction engine was becalmed in the sandy square, another had a tiny
locomotive
that once steamed into the desert where they mined the nitrates left in the parched beds of ancient lakes.

The bus stopped between two green cliffs of sugar cane, and the driver shouted, ‘The ruins!’ We entered the site between the two mounds of bare dry dirt, which rose like the stumps of giant termite hills from the green valley floor. They looked like natural hills, but they were the remains of a huge temple complex of adobe pyramids.