Cloud Road (33 page)

Much later, in 1824, during the wars for independence from the Spanish, Junín was also the site of a
confrontation
dubbed the Battle of the Centaurs, because only the cavalry factions were effectively engaged. That astonishing man, Simon Bolívar, led the republican forces. For independence from Spain, he would fight three hundred battles or skirmishes, and never took a bullet wound. He conquered far more than Hernán Cortés or Francisco
Pizarro: as much as Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan or Augustus Caesar. Yet he died in a borrowed shirt, racked with tuberculosis, steeped in opiates, exiled from countries he had himself created.

The valley down to La Oroya was a limestone gulch, stripped of vegetation, the blinding white rock funnelling the sun into the furnace at its foot, where, sweltering in heat, dust and glare, the mines, smelters and railways of La Oroya buckled and shimmered. I felt close to fainting from the heat. I opened
Lonely Planet
at the portrait of the author. I repeated to his face his description of La Oroya: ‘a cold, unattractive place’. I tore out the page, and used it to clean the dust off a window too hot to touch.

On the edge of town, all traffic had been halted. ‘Is it an accident?’ I asked the driver.

‘No, the last schoolday before Independence Day on the weekend. They stop all the traffic for the parades. If you change to a local minibus, they’ll take you in.’

Crowds choked the centre. A quietly spoken taxi driver took me to the few hostels that existed. They were dirty and expensive. Frustrated, overheating, I said to the driver, ‘I only want to stay long enough to catch the train to Huancayo.’

‘No, not possible,’ he said and waggled his finger at me. It is a polite gesture in Peru, but makes me feel like a naughty child.

‘Why not?’

‘Since the railways were privatised there are no more passenger services from La Oroya, only special excursions.’

‘Take me to the bus station.’

I bought my ticket out to Jauja, a nice sleepy
old-fashioned
country town, and stood outside a shop to wait
the four hours until departure. The kind owner brought out a wooden chair for me. Giant locomotives squealed in slow pain, up and down the track. The bus shook us through town beneath the towering chimneys at the smelter, along a valley lined with slag heaps, and beneath an aerial mineral line. The valley floor was already in shadow. Slowly the landscape softened, plants appeared in cracks, trees at the river’s edge. Thickets of broom appeared, bearing clouds of brilliant yellow flowers. In Peru, its roots are used to prepare a contraceptive. I wondered idly how it was applied. And where.

Jauja was a long time coming. When my neighbour said it was fifteen minutes more, the bus broke down, but the driver and bus boy had it going again in fifteen more. It was a major Inca city with 100,000 inhabitants, located where one of the greatest of all Inca roads, coming from the antique temple of Pachacamac near Lima, met the Royal Highway. The final section, in the mountains of Pariacaca, has been described as the most difficult piece of road in the world. The Jesuit José de Acosta described his own passage up it, reduced to vomiting first food, then phlegm and finally blood. He looked up to see a companion ‘that did beat himself against the earth, crying out for the rage and grief which this passage of Pariacaca had caused’. Jauja was briefly the first Spanish capital, chosen in 1535 for its central location, so it was an appropriate place to be on the Independence Day weekend. It was famous for its
molle
trees
, Schinus molle
.
They grow to twenty-five feet high and were highly valued by the Incas. The long leaf is very distinctive, like a slender mimosa. The Incas used the twigs to clean their teeth; now they are processed to make toothpaste and perfumes. It fruits in elderberry-like clusters, purplish-mauve in colour, which were used to make strong wine, vinegar, syrups and dyes. The bark was boiled to make an infusion to relieve pain and swelling in the legs. The wood was used for timber, and its ashes to make soap. In a sacred grove of these trees, here in Jauja, was a fountain where an ancient people worshipped pre-Inca gods. One day, a crowd of devils appeared around Jauja, and tormented the people, until five suns appeared and drove them away, leaving the ground black and charred. It reads like a folk memory of volcanic eruptions.

I found a hostel, cleaned up and looked for a beer. In the square, the first day’s Independence Day celebrations were winding down. Stalls and stages were being dismantled; I had missed the music. The town’s notables were still doing what councillors do best: drinking the taxes. I felt respectable enough to gatecrash their marquee, and buy beer. They were mostly too drunk to talk to, but I got a seat, and surveyed the square.

Jauja is a small town, benefiting from having enough prosperity to look after its buildings but not enough to pull them down for modern ones; but change is beginning. In the corner of the square, a hostel and neighbouring offices brutalise the setting of the long, low colonial town hall. Colonial style means different things in different places, but in Sierran towns certain features were consistent. Apart from churches, it was rare to build over two storeys. Shade from fierce sun and shelter from
torrential rain were uppermost, so porticoes, covered walkways beneath the upper storey, were built into many of the quality buildings, as were balconies, which sometimes ran across the whole frontage of the building. Windows were tall and narrow, allowing light in from top to bottom of the high-ceilinged rooms. Any building of importance had one door tall enough for a rider to enter mounted.

I crossed the square to the main church, where a service had finished, and a procession was forming. ‘We are marching across town to the Pentecostal Church!’ said a teenage boy in black trousers and poncho over a white shirt, wetting the reed of his bass saxophone. It might seem strange to encounter Pentecostals in the heart of the Andes, where you anticipate fervent Catholicism blended with native belief. But in the very year that San Martín declared independence, 1821, Diego Thompson, a Church of Scotland Minister, landed in Peru and began an ambitious educational programme in the Andes. The country was still unstable, and his plans foundered, but at the end of the century John Ritchie arrived, another charismatic Scot. He found that all previous missionaries had sought the approval of the ruling classes, believing that through changing their attitudes one could change the country. They built schools for the children of the rich: nothing changed.

Ritchie argued with his superiors that a traditional Presbyterian Church could not be imposed successfully; Peru must evolve its own form of ministry, adapted to the country. They disagreed: he resigned and formed the Peruvian Evangelical Church. He left the rich, quit their cities and went into the mountains and the jungles,
recruiting local peasant leaders as agents. First, he had to teach them to read. It worked. They now operate in villages where a Catholic priest is never seen. In the Andes, two-thirds of the priests who do exist are foreign. Few Peruvian men seek a job with poor pay and no sex. The General Secretary of the Peruvian Evangelical Church, Pastor Luis Minaya Ballón, has given a damning view of how the Catholic Church failed to serve the poor. ‘The Catholic Church arrived as part of the Spanish empire’s expansion; the cross arrived with the sword. After centuries of co-operation between ecclesiastical power and political power, the Catholic Church needs to examine its history in a critical manner. It can no longer continue to cover up the past and say, “We have been at the side of the people,” because it isn’t true. The Catholic Church continues to be identified with the status quo, which will not benefit it in the future.’ The working methods of the Peruvian Evangelical Church would be copied by another organisation throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, bringing the country to its knees. But the story of the Maoists of the Shining Path belongs south, in Ayacucho.

The bass saxophone player lined up with half a dozen others in the same dress, carrying alto and tenor saxes and a clarinet. One played an Andean harp upside down on his shoulder. A fiddler led us round the square, with a thin reedy verse. The wind instruments came in for the chorus with great power. The tone was very strange, rough, but full of raw emotion, chest-shaking yet ghostly: very Andean. I danced in their procession through the town, the violin and the wind instruments alternating. The tune stayed with me for days.

Early next morning I caught a collective taxi down the
asphalt main road which ran straight and level to the small town of La Concepción, near which was an ancient monastery with a fine library. Education arrived in Latin America far sooner than in the north. The first printing press was established in Mexico City in 1535, one hundred years before Cambridge, Massachusetts had one. The first Latin American university was founded in Trinidad in 1538, ninety-eight years before Harvard. Starved of new reading, I was looking forward to spending time in a little-visited treasure house of books. By nine o’clock, I was checking into an old-fashioned colonial hostel on La Concepción’s square, and closing a door festooned with locks, bolts and chains.

Another collective taxi took me up the hill to the small village of Santa Rosa, and left me in a broken square with a pink church, where two bands and a troupe of costumed dancers were threading flowers and green sprigs through their hatbands. I walked to the Franciscan friary on the edge of the village. The Franciscan Order was one of the more attractive orders, training its monks in the belief that science and knowledge would enrich the wisdom and happiness of mankind. Friar Francisco de San José founded this friary in 1725. Its novices were fearless, and, unlike many priests, they really did seek out the poor. Despatched to remote areas, more than eighty of its graduates died violent deaths, mostly in the rainforest. They studied the native cures and brought back samples to study. One was the bark of a tree that yielded quinine, the first effective remedy for malaria. Unfortunately, the only way to see the friary was to take a group tour with a guide.

The monks’ cells were simple and spare, interspersed
with workshops to make the community as self-sufficient as possible. There was a smithy, a loom and even a cobbler’s shop. But the Spaniards’ continuing dependence on foreign imports for quality manufactures was betrayed by a detail on a broken nineteenth-century cartwheel. The hub was cast iron, and it was made in the Rue de Colossé in Paris.

One room was luminous with brilliantly coloured murals depicting the lives of the friars who went to the Amazon. Although most died of infections and fevers, the painter knew a good story when he saw one. The men were shown being stabbed and beheaded, while one poor soul, wearing only red underpants, was hung upside-down by one leg from a tree overhanging a river, his head under water, while a native drew a knife across the rope. It was painted in primary colours: torture in Toytown.

I couldn’t wait for the highlight: the library of twenty thousand books. It was a simple rectangular room with a gallery around it, but in glass display cases were rare early Bibles and sixteenth-century Psalters, in French, Spanish and Latin. There was a superb 1644 atlas of William Blaeu, the great Amsterdam mapmaker, who studied with the astronomer Tycho Brahe. His brother Jan became official cartographer to the Dutch East India Company. As I knelt down to take a better look, the guide called, ‘Come on! That is all the time we have in here.’

I scribbled down other titles: a leather-bound copy of the 1590 chronicle of the Jesuit José de Acosta, three volumes on Hernán Cortés, conqueror of Mexico, the three-volume
History of the Destruction of the Indies
, by the great humanist Bartolomé de las Casas and ancient vellum volumes whose handwritten spines faded into
ghost titles.

At the desk, I showed them my letter from the embassy. ‘Would it be possible to spend longer in the library?’

‘No.’

‘Would you read the letter first?’

‘No.’

I said, ‘Thank you,’ but she had already turned away.

In the evening, the square began to liven up. It was Sunday, Independence Day proper. The strangest object in the whole plaza was a smart blue four-wheel-drive, with Lima plates. An attractive woman around forty waved me over. ‘I’m Pati, have a drink with us!’ The car hi-fi was playing dance music and the tailgate was their drinks bar. Only one beer bottle was opened at a time, a small glass was passed round with it, you filled it, drained it and passed it on, ensuring you all caught the same diseases and had no idea how much you had drunk. If your glass finished the bottle, the next bottle was opened and passed to you to start it, with the injunction
‘¡Saca la venena!’
– take out the poison! – to make it safe for the rest to drink. The men were all drunk and the women wanted to dance. So I was shared round, hoping it wouldn’t offend any of the men. Three country musicians came over, a youth with a decaying fiddle, his mother with a drum and his father with a cornet made from five cowhorns corkscrewed end to end. ‘It’s rare to see them now, it’s called a
huacerapuca
,’ said Pati, and she turned off the hi-fi while the family played: serious, deadpan. The horn made my skin tingle. It was powerful, with a ghostly tone: the very tone that the bass saxophone players had been striving for in the procession at Jauja.

A pleasant but very drunken young man kept coming
across and saying, ‘Peru, it’s a great country!’

‘A wonderful country!’

‘Do you like Peru?’

‘I love it.’

Ten minutes later he would come back and go through it all over again. The plaza filled with people who formed a square, in which a band leader was organising a traditional dance. A burly peasant woman, middle-aged, bursting with vigour, took charge. Pati explained. ‘First she will dance on her own, then she will choose a man. They will lead the dance, gradually other couples will join in.’ The woman put her hands on her hips and made a complicated pass around the square, then headed straight for me. Everyone cheered, she clutched me as close as a purse. ‘You married?’