Cloud Road (19 page)

The dawn air was stirred into life by the deep thrum of large hummingbirds. Down the trail, still with Pups in tow, we met a tiny woman who said she was seventy years old, but looked to have been here since the Flood. A cataract fogged her right eye. Four sleek black goats followed her like dogs. She carried a slender eucalyptus pole, twice her own height. ‘Ah!’ she said, flinging her arms wide, ‘You are of the race of the people of the Gringos! May God bless you! There are Germans in town who have given me spectacles.’ She broke off to stroke the goat at her side, and knock down acacia pods with the long pole. ‘The Gringos are so kind. I am an orphan, I’ve never married, I have no family, I live alone. These four goats are my only friends.’ She spoke with affection, not self-pity.

Within forty minutes we were in San Marcos. Expecting a sleepy village, we turned a corner to find a two-acre dirt square cacophonous with the weekly livestock market. Trucks from the Lima meat markets journey 440 miles
north along the coast to Trujillo then up into the mountains. Fifteen of them were filling with cattle, sheep, goats, horses, mules and donkeys. The smell of charcoal, seared meat, hot potato soups and frying fish mingled with odours of rope, leather and animals whose coats and fleeces grew hot in the sun. The streets were thronged with people threading their way between the stalls. Blankets blazed with tomatoes, limes, oranges, sheaves of spring onions, the wrinkled phalluses of fir-apple potatoes and multi-coloured chillies, shiny as plastic.

Elaine looked up and down the street. ‘Why don’t we stay?’

She was absolutely right. It was easy to get obsessed about putting miles under our belt. But, I asked, ‘What about Pups?’

We looked. He’d gone. ‘It’s good that he’s gone home,’ said Elaine dutifully.

I said, ‘I miss him already.’

‘Me too.’

Ten minutes later our packs were in the Hostal Sol Nasciente, The Sun Being Born Hostel, and we were drinking in one of the shanty bars in the livestock market. Some peasant farmers and their families moved over to make room at their trestle. ‘We are from the mountains,’ said a red-eyed man with gap teeth, and he swept his arm around an array of peaks visible from the open-sided stall. His wife ate enough for two, he drank more than enough for three. ‘You are rich,’ he said, pointing to the bottled beer. ‘Three soles.’ He slapped the table with the flat of his hand. ‘We drink
chicha
, for one sole. That is the only way we can afford to get drunk.’

Most of the animals were sold by one-thirty, so they
could reach the city abattoirs that evening and be in the markets next morning. The street stalls came down soon after. By late afternoon, Brigadoon had gone, and we were just two more tumbleweeds in the main street. A café produced lamb so tough that I ate half before realising the pieces I had pushed to the edge of the plate were not bones but meat. We went back to the room to wash clothes and write diaries, fuelled by a bottle of ‘Superior Aniseed’. Elaine sipped and, when she finished wincing, whispered throatily, ‘What’s the alcohol content?’

I consulted the label. ‘Doesn’t say. I bought it on the strength of the logo, which showed a condor crashing into a mountain.’

We stayed another day but it wasn’t the same without the market. The few people who appeared wandered disconsolately, as if searching town for the missing. The following day we wound out of San Marcos and over high moor until we came to the head of the path down into the next valley. It was a vast view, one that few places on the earth can offer. Five miles ahead, still in the foreground, was the junction of the Cajamarca and Crisnejas Rivers; both ran in huge trough-shaped valleys. The mountains flanking the Cajamarca River seemed to go on forever, in pale watercolour washes. We slithered and lunged down a steep, rough, rocky trail. The shoulder of the hill cut us off from the breeze; it was tough, hot, uncomfortable walking. When we sat down to rest by a pool, black and purple butterflies drank at our sides. In the grass was an olive stick insect with a hood like a Ku Klux Klansman.

With relief, we finally came down onto the valley floor by a field where a man in a sky-blue shirt stood in a circle of wheat running a light grey horse over it to separate the
grain. We went down a long, dusty, straight road into La Grama. It was the most disturbing town I have ever visited. It reminded me of one place only, a spot just north of Pisagua in the Chilean desert: a cemetery where dried corpses grinned from collapsed vaults. Pizarro spent his third night here; the locals still seem to resent it. People who had been standing in doorways turned inside into the shadow; a guitar playing a light melody trickled into silence. We stopped at a small shop where a mother served us bottles of lemonade. We asked about her three children, staring at us from the corner shadows. As we left, two more climbed out of the fruit boxes where they had been hiding out of fear.

The road ran at the foot of a bare cliff. A few houses straggled along the other side; below them was a dust-blown bare plain, a ramshackle collection of half-shaped twisted poles, like the crutches and props in a Salvador Dalí. Standing in the middle was the hotel-restaurant La Casona, lifeless as the husk of a wasp at the foot of a hot window. A tiled shed leaned like a drunk whose outstretched arm had just missed the lamppost. To the right of this was a tree cemetery: heat-blasted trunks lopped into ugly club shapes. When someone had to get to the other side of this space, without exception, they walked around it.

We kept going and crossed the river on a high steel bridge. Below, a naked girl swam with the current, her skin shining like a fresh horse chestnut. The land was harsh, parched, bare, broken ground. We asked a woman how many streams there were in the miles ahead. She shook her head. We stocked up with as much water as we could carry. Throughout the next day, the landscape
slowly returned to greenery. It warmed the heart to see fat, blue-grey piglets running from a pond, gleaming like baby elephants. The sun sank towards mountains untold miles away across the Condebamba valley. The scene was delicate and balanced: a landscape on a Japanese fan. There were eucalyptus trees, and the sculptural blades of
cabuya
cactuses, the occasional one sending up a towering twenty-foot flower spike before dying, its hundred-year life consumed in this final frenzy of procreation. The native species,
Furcraea andina
, is green, but these beautiful blue-green monsters,
Agave americana
, have been introduced from Central America. As well as providing fibre for ropes and sandals, they yield soaps, medicines and an evil liquor. The lane became a street; we had reached Cajabamba.

The town sits on a ledge ringed by peaks, like the dress circle at a theatre. There was a hostel on the small square, and we took a corner room overlooking the gardens. In the morning, we found it also overlooked the departure point of the 02:30 bus to Cajamarca. The only other guest was a young American woman who was carrying her own toilet seat. ‘You need a toilet you can trust.’ We saw her two days later; she was pale yellow. ‘I think it’s dysentery.’

We looked round the covered market. Outside, three horses were tied to a
No Parking
sign. We breakfasted on fruit juices blended from fresh fruit. The alfalfa came highly recommended for its vitamins, but tasted as it looked, like lawn clippings. The meat section of the market fascinated us. Many people cannot read, so a recognisable part of the animal is left next to the carcass to identify the meat: a sheep’s head, a cow’s hoof or the tail of a goat with a tuft of hair on the end like a fly
whisk. One pig’s head had a raffish smile and a curl at the corner of his lip as if he had just removed a fat cigar.

Traditional medicine is still widely used in a society where few can afford a doctor and many have never put aside old beliefs, only added new ones. For millennia, Andean peoples have traded with the Amazon, the biggest store of natural medicines in the world. Just down the road from the chemist was a stall stacked with bottles, herbs, scented wood, red seeds for necklaces, dried phallic fungi and the three-toed feet of wild deer. No one knew where the stallholder was. A lady wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat with a huge flowerpot crown said she could help. I pointed at brown stones, apparently covered with fine fur. ‘Haematite,’ she said. ‘The fur is iron filings, to prove it’s magnetic.’ Elaine picked up the sad body of a small toucan, scarcely bigger than its grey and yellow beak. ‘What are these used for?’

The woman shrugged. No one else knew. There was a pile of ten of these fabulous forest birds. You come to a medicine man, as you do to a doctor, not simply to buy, but to consult: he will tell you what you need. Elaine held up a scallop shell containing a seed like a nutmeg, a segment from a necklace, a plant tendril, two red beans and two pieces of crew-cut haematite.

A man’s voice said, ‘For good luck!’ It was the returning owner, eating mincemeat fried in dough. He was young, and dressed in western clothes.

‘How much does good luck cost?’ asked Elaine.

‘Twenty-five soles’ – five pounds.

‘No wonder most locals can’t afford luck.’

We did not believe. He lost interest.

It was a nice little town, which came alive in the
evenings. An old man sat at the foot of a high wall, playing guitar. His quavering voice recounted poignant stories of young love. We sat at his side, chatting between songs. In the square another voice sang out, a man dead fifty years, but I would know him anywhere: the Italian tenor Beniamino Gigli. We joined the children below the open doors of a second-floor balcony, and listened to Massenet’s ‘O dolce incanto’ on an old 78 r.p.m. recording.

‘Who lives there?’ I asked a group of boys.

‘A young person.’

‘No! An old lady, she owns the property.’

‘Don Miguel. He is sixty years old. No one ever sees him.’

Finally: ‘Ask her, she lives there.’

A girl about eleven years old stood among others her own age, but, somehow, not with them. She held a golden angel which she spun round on the end of a thread. She held it to her neck, as if it were jewellery she was thinking of buying. The other girls could look, but not touch. Her clothes were a cut above her friends’, but a little old-fashioned, as if chosen by conservative grandparents. Gigli was filling out the great notes of that most lyrical of arias, Ponchielli’s ‘Cielo e mar’.

I said to her, ‘It’s beautiful music. Do you know Don Miguel?’

‘I am his daughter.’ She looked at the ground and hugged the angel to her chest. Through the open balcony doors, I could see only the blue ceiling, crossed by varnished beams, and a man, pacing.

‘I would like to meet him.’ But as I looked down she was gone, slipping into a narrow doorway, closing the heavy old door, thud, behind her shiny, black, sensible
shoes. I stood listening to the last notes:
Adieu, adieu!

We were ready to move on, but we had a problem. There were no longer any bus services southwards through the Sierra. We were struggling to carry all our gear, and there were no pack animals to be had. The next section of Inca road was neither the easiest to navigate nor the most scenic. We decided to bus down to the isolated hill town of Huari and pick up the Royal Road there, and walk for two weeks. We would have to go back to Cajamarca, then take another bus to the port of Trujillo, then a third along the coast and a final one up to Huari, travelling three sides of a rectangle.

The coach was bad, even by country standards. The whole interior looked like a dinosaur that had died in moult. The road was hard and rough. In a straight line, it was thirty-eight miles. It took five hours. We fell down the steps into the bus yard and waited for our bags. They were the last things out. Next to last were two very frightened sheep. Our bags were covered in sheep urine. A sympathetic cleaner let us hose them down.

We bought tickets for the overnight bus to Trujillo, and braced ourselves for another tough journey, and a sleepless night. At ten in the evening, we went down to the yard, and stepped on board. It was a coach outside, and the club class section of a 747 on the inside. The digital quality screens were playing the video of John Lennon’s
Imagine
with hi-fi quality sound. It was the most luxurious bus I have been on anywhere in the world. We tilted the seats back into astronaut launch positions, and, lulled by the rhythm of the hairpins, slept all the way down to Trujillo.

At Trujillo bus station we bought tickets for the six a.m.
bus down the coast to the fishing port of Chimbote. ‘From there, you can buy tickets to Huaraz, and from Huaraz to Huari,’ said the helpful clerk. I turned to Elaine, ‘Chimbote is a big fishing port, it might be fun to stay a night, get some fresh seafood.’

The Chimbote bus took us across the town, and into the desert. Elaine pointed to a brown silhouette, like half a ziggurat, already undulating in the hot air rising from the sand. We had visited the Temple of the Sun two years before. Below it was the smaller, but better preserved, Temple of the Moon. They were the work of the Moche people, and, until their fall around
AD
800, this was the glorious capital of the civilisation which created the Lord of Sipán. The Temple of the Sun was the largest building in the native Americas, covering thirteen acres. One hundred and thirty million bricks once raised it over ninety feet high. Spanish gold-fever ruined the temple. It was too big to excavate, so they diverted a river into the side of it, washing the adobe bricks into mud and sieving the waste. Little was found. Wisely, the Moche lived in the desert and farmed the coastal plain. Modern Trujillo sprawls all over the plain, and they try to irrigate the desert. They are now using all the known water, and no one has any idea where to find more.

We rolled south, hugging the straight and sandy coast. Shore, sea and sky shivered in a grey dance. Huge cinder-grey engineering sheds and smelters announced Chimbote. It sits on the shore of what was once the richest fishery in the world. Trembling anchovies poured into iced wooden cases in rivers of shimmering chainmail. In the sixties, overfishing began to take its toll. In 1970, an earthquake flattened the city.