Cloud Road (24 page)

In the 1920s, my grandfather was shipwrecked in Australia, and briefly lived by begging. ‘You had to let them know quickly that you weren’t a bum, that you wanted work. I used to begin, “Sir, I am an English seaman fallen upon hard times.”’ I began my prepared speech, designed to quickly allay any anxiety. ‘We are two English tourists walking the Inca Highway, and would like a small piece of land to pitch our tent for the night.’ I was really giving him a few moments to size us up, but while I was still speaking, I realized he already had. ‘I am Juan, please come in.’ He took Dapple to waist-deep grass,
where, hearing that she was newly bought, he tied her securely to a tree. His wife curtsied, ‘I am Senya, God welcome and bless you.’ Another little girl, Madelene, stood behind her, shy, but not frightened. ‘Please sit here,’ Senya indicated a bench against the wall of the veranda. In a minute, a jug of delicious, cool herb lemonade arrived with two glasses. As I sipped it I looked around at a happy and contented family, self-sufficient in the important things in life, working at growing their own food and raising livestock. Elaine and I had met in her mid-and my late-thirties, and wanted children very much. Miscarriages and failed IVF treatment followed. We had recently had to face the fact that we would not have children. That knowledge was still a shadow on the sun. Babies and toddlers can still be a bittersweet joy, but tonight I felt no sadness, nor, I think, did Elaine. Here was that rare thing: a happy family.

‘The lemonade was perfect,’ said Elaine, ‘we just need a little corner to put up our tent, then we need be no more trouble to you.’

‘Not at all,’ and she took us to a clean dry storeroom with a bed in it, opening directly onto the yard. She made the bed while Juan tidied sacks of potatoes snug against the wall. Elaine fingered the wisps of a moss or lichen they were packed in. ‘It looks like the grey winter plumes on wild clematis,’ she said.

‘It is a parasite which grows on our trees, a little poisonous,’ said Juan, ‘and bad for the trees, but it stops the potatoes going mouldy.’

‘There,’ said Senya, ‘now supper is ready.’ They were good Samaritans, long frustrated by the lack of unfortunate travellers to help. One large room served for
kitchen and dining room. We sat around the candlelit table while Senya said grace, and three-year-old Madelene watched our shadows dancing on the wall behind. Senya brought sweet soup made from oats and quinoa, a
high-altitude
buckwheat used as a cereal. The main course was stuffed kaywa, a sweet green vegetable from a vine-like plant, which they grew themselves.

‘Are you from this area?’ I asked Juan.

‘I am from Huari, but my family all moved to Lima to look for work, ten years ago. Senya is from Tingo María in the rainforest. When we married, we lived in Tingo María: I opened a shop. There was a lot of money coming into the town, from the coca growing: the local Datsun franchise won the World Dealer of the Year Award. We opened new businesses and saved hard, but I did not trust the banks. One day, drug paramilitaries attacked my house, demanding money. I did not want them to hurt anyone, so I gave them all I had: $70,000. Because I gave it so quickly, they said I must have much more. They tied me to a chair and beat me. They made Senya watch. Everyone in town knew what was going on in the house, but no one dared do anything, not the police, nobody. They kept me like that for four days, beating me. But there was nothing left to give them. Finally they got tired and left. But I couldn’t stay there. We came back here, my brothers had this land along the river which they didn’t use. We have planted fruit trees, bought a few animals and some beehives.’

Senya put her hand on Elaine’s wrist. ‘God did not desert us. When we first bought hives the first bees all died. Juan and his brothers went down into the fields, next to the hives, and prayed, asking God what they
should do. While they were kneeling, a black cloud of bees descended and went straight into the hives, and they have prospered ever since.’ She pushed a jar of honey towards us. We spread its amber over the fresh white bread, and bit deeply.

Their story typified the problems facing Tingo María. On the cooler hillsides above the tropical rainforest flourishes an unremarkable-looking bush:
Erythroxylum coca
. The leaves are like small bay leaves but with a rounded tip. From the earliest times, there is pottery showing men whose cheeks bulge with wads of coca. When chewed, they release a drug that kills pain and hunger. The Inca elite reserved its use to themselves, but the Spanish democratised it, using it to keep their underfed native serfs on their feet long enough to work themselves to death. It became worth more than any crop except spices.

In 1860 a German chemist extracted the active alkaloid, C
₁₇
H
₂₁
NO
₄
, and gave the world cocaine, the first local anaesthetic. For the first time, coca was exported. The rich Huallaga valley also produced natural rubber, coffee, quinine and the plant barbasco, whose roots produced the insecticide rotenone. The Second World War stimulated booms in quinine, for troops fighting in malarial zones, and rubber, for military vehicles. In 1945, these markets dwindled; synthetic rubber displaced natural latex, and DDT superseded rotenone. The dairy, beef and tea production promoted by US advisers only made economic sense on large estates. Smallholders continued to grow coca for traditional uses, and for illegal cocaine. By 1960, the Huallaga valley was producing 60 per cent of the world’s coca. From 1961,
the US began coercing Peruvian governments to eradicate coca entirely, whatever its use. The economy, culture and traditions of small farmers in the Andes were attacked to solve white-collar drug abuse and the problems of America’s youth. This policy continues. Ecuador has complied, and coca leaves are not legally for sale for any purpose. Peru resists: coca is more central to its traditions; besides, drugs fund most of the graft pocketed by governments.

At first light, I walked down the garden to check Dapple. Her rope was wrapped round her neck, all her legs and the tree. She looked like a failed game of bondage. When I leaned on her shoulder to free her, my hand came away wet with unclotted blood that streamed down to the top of her leg. I tried to see where she could have hurt herself. There was no nail or wire on the tree. When I bathed her coat, I could find no wound. I retied her, and walked back to wash in the yard. Juan was there.

‘Do you have vampire bats?’

‘Yes! They attack livestock, and carry rabies.’

‘That’s all I need, a rabid homing donkey.’ It left me thinking about the underground gallery at Chavín. I later checked. We had been walled in with vampire bats.

Juan surveyed his orchard, ‘I would like more beehives, but since Shirley was born three months ago, Senya has had blood infections and the medicine takes all our money. She is still not strong.’

I gave Senya a little money, ‘Another beehive for the next time we come.’ I gave Juan a packet of fishhooks. Senya said, ‘Do not take water from the big river, it is poisoned with mercury from the big mine.’

We were on the road to the small town of Castillo by
half-past eight. Juan had tied the bags on Dapple for us, placing one across the shoulders, and the other along the spine. I couldn’t say I had any confidence in the new arrangement. Senya gave us fruit from their garden, and looked at the hot sun. ‘Today there may be snakes on the trail.’

I showed interest; we had seen little wildlife.

‘Yes, you must take your sticks and kill them!’

The temperature was already 80°F and, as we began climbing the soaring hairpins, there was no movement in the sultry air. After twenty minutes Dapple’s pack slipped to one side. I heaved it back and took up the slack in the cinch. We plodded on. Elaine was walking very slowly, but I knew from her breathing and pale mauve face that it wasn’t through lack of effort. I offered her the bag of coca leaves. She selected around ten, rolled them into a wad, and placed them in her cheek. She gagged. ‘I’d forgotten how horrible they taste.’

‘Take a drink.’ She took a swig of water, then dipped her finger in the bag of white powder which helps release the active alkaloid. Dapple was frustrating. She wouldn’t keep pace. If I had been carrying my pack myself, I would have been walking faster. The hairpins went on for an hour and a half, until, turning a flank in the hill, there was nothing in front of us but a chasm eight hundred feet deep. A massive landslip higher up had carried away the trail. I couldn’t see any alternative but to retrace our steps for half an hour and cut down to the valley floor. One of the shepherds’ paths might lead to Castillo. Elaine, now a rather pleasant plum colour, walked a little higher than I had. ‘Is this a trail made since the landslide?’

I stumbled up to where she stood, and kissed her. We
were soon on a much narrower new path; there wasn’t room for us to walk past each other. The ground fell away beneath us much more steeply. You couldn’t help thinking the ‘one slip and I’ll bounce for a thousand feet’ thought. I glued my eyes to the path, and ignored the view down. When we were in the middle of a particularly narrow section, Dapple’s pack slipped loose. I would have preferred to carry on until we were somewhere safer to fix it, but if a bag fell off now, we would never get it back. We did our first unaided loading of the donkey in the most dangerous position we would ever do it. I sensed Elaine was very nervous. So was I, but I thought it would be better if I pretended this was nothing out of the ordinary.

‘Let’s try lashing the two bags together on the ground with the rope, then hanging one either side of Dapple and securing with the cinch.’ As we lifted them onto her back, Dapple interpreted something I said in English as ‘Giddy-up!’ in Quechua, and walked away. I hopped along at her side, trying to hold onto all our luggage with one hand, and bend down to catch her lead-rope with the other. A quarter of an hour later we had everything back on, much snugger. Twenty minutes later, we rejoined the road, still a little shaken. We passed through a dilapidated village and up through its fly-blown square to two shops whose frontage lay in the shade of a narrow steep alley, which looked like a robber’s alley. This was Castillo. We bought lemonade, drank it straight off, bought more, and drank that too, while locals gathered around, talking about us in Quechua and laughing; the Spanish word
carga
, a load, came up a lot. Whether they were speculating on what was in the bags, or just wildly amused at our way of tying it on, we couldn’t tell.

This alley was the old Inca road. Imagine stepping out of your front door onto an Inca paving stone. We began to meet family groups bringing their animals home to their villages at the end of day. I asked an old lady if there was any flat land to pitch our tent. She replied in Quechua. I sketched a tent in my notebook and said ‘Flat land?’ in Spanish. She pointed higher up, in pain from a frozen shoulder, and mimed a little money for medicine. We gave her some, and she kissed our hands and blessed us. We passed through a village where the women and children hid from us, and the men moved into groups and stood aside discussing us. I frowned at Elaine. ‘I’m afraid unfriendly people are much more likely to rob us, and Juan warned me this morning about thieves here.’ We came to some small fields enclosed by crude stone walls, and removed enough stones to let ourselves in. We gave Dapple an armful of green corn, and pitched the tent in the top corner of the field close to boulders we could use as seats and tables, and which would shield us from the road. We heard cows, sheep, donkeys and horses being driven down the lane, but no one bothered us. We could see almost back to Huari, a day and a half’s walk away, far away and far below. Children’s voices sang to each other down in the village. Elaine boiled eggs and pasta, and we had onions, tomatoes and chillies. After, we sat tight together in a stone seat, watching shooting stars tracing their silverpoint lines through the constellations. Satellites glided over, and the rising moon flooded out the Milky Way. From the darkness came the remorseless sound of chewing.

Next day things seemed to begin smoothly. By seven forty, I thought we were nearly ready, but Dapple used her shape-shifting powers to turn her back to Teflon, and everything slid off before it could be tied. At eight forty-five we hit the trail alongside a boy who only came up to my hip, but carried an adult’s mattock over one shoulder. He was off to dig the fields. His little sister, her face hidden between a big, low-brimmed hat and a red skirt pulled high up her chest, drove a cow along with a switch. She was tiny enough to walk under it without ducking, but the cow wasn’t allowed to loiter. It was a bright cool morning, ideal for walking.

We rested around eleven, studying an Inca stair rising unmistakably on the flank of the hill across the valley. It looked a short twenty-minute climb to the pass, with one steep section. We were already well over 13,000 feet, and Dapple’s slow pace was no longer a problem since we couldn’t manage any faster ourselves. At first, there were a few yards of grass between each low stone step, quite a comfortable way to climb. Higher up, frost had broken up the staircase into rubble. It became tricky, tiring work. I had done my best to meet Dapple halfway, learning enough Quechua to say
qishta
, stop, and
ripuna
, let’s go. She still repeatedly stopped abruptly. Each time, I lost momentum, balance and breath. Was she deaf? Altitude makes most people irritable: I wasn’t immune. I found myself pointing to the obstacle she had decided was insurmountable, ‘This is Peru, you live here. It’s a
nine-inch
step onto flat grass. What is the matter?’ Elaine enjoyed this hugely. ‘So the seasoned Andean hiker
recommends sarcasm for an animal that thinks “Walk” is a long, difficult instruction.’ Dapple had her own way of answering back. After every admonishment, she blew a tuba solo of rubbery farts.

There was a huge U-shaped valley to our right, recently glaciated, the soil still thin and the grain of the rocks showing through. The Ice Age seemed to have ended in living memory. After an hour we reached the bleak summit of the pass at 14,400 feet. There was a rising slope to our left, a thirty-foot high block of bedrock to our right, and the wind singing like a saw between them. It was no place to linger. As often happened, the landscape changed character as the watershed was crossed. We descended rapidly to a valley carpeted in long wiry grass, where a large tarn lay beneath black crags, its waters dark holly-green. Below it, the wind bent the grasses double, sending ripples of light dancing before each gust. Far away, across the green sea, two girls called to russet dogs. They tore through the pasture driving sheep before them, surfing waves of light, converging on a stone clapper bridge over a river. Lines of sheep were driven together into a gyrating mass, a white whorl of a thumbprint, constantly changing identity.