Cloud Road (34 page)

‘No,’ said the idiot temporarily in charge of my mouth.

‘When do we get married?’

I procrastinated. ‘Mañana!’

‘We’re going to get married!’ she screamed to louder cheers.

‘What time?’ she pushed.

‘Nine o’clock.’

‘And after we get married, how long until we –’ she made a ring with finger and thumb and pushed her other forefinger vigorously in and out of it.

‘Ten minutes. If I’m not there, start without me.’

The party drifted back to a house, where, hearing I was born in Liverpool, they played Beatles tapes. They made the noises of the words without knowing the meaning.

He was here again. ‘Peru, it’s a great country!’

‘A wonderful country!’

‘Do you like Peru?’

‘I love it.’

He leaned on my shoulder and sniffled all the way through ‘Yesterday’. At the end, he stood up. ‘My brother, he was killed. He was killed in the army, some stupid border dispute with Ecuador. The bastards just shot him!’ His eyes filled with tears and he looked through the walls to whatever he saw of his brother’s dying moments. He hugged me. ‘Bastards!’

I was locked out of the hotel. The maid came to open the heavy doors. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘It’s okay,’ she kissed me on each cheek. ‘It’s Independence Day.’

I headed for Huancayo, famous throughout Peru for its carved gourds, the dried shells of squash fruits. I shared a collective taxi with two women who were taking a large pot of trout stew to a food fair, and protesting at the driver’s lack of care over the potholes. Where my guidebook said Hostal Casa Bonilla should be was a handsome colonial house, flying the national flag, but no sign that it was in business. A maid answered my knocking, ‘Yes, we are still open, but the Señor does not wish to advertise.’

I crossed a cloister courtyard of lush succulents, cacti and arum lilies. A fine, nineteenth-century woodcarving of a Madonna and child stood in one corner. Around it stood leather chests, and stands of large glass-stoppered bottles, artistically arranged. A husky dog nuzzled my hand. ‘He’s called Drake,’ she said, ‘after the English pirate.’

My room opened directly onto the courtyard, and was the best in all my trip, furnished with old furniture you would select for a home, not a hotel. I sat on a sofa in the cloister outside and watched a tall, rangy man with white skin come out of a bedroom, scuffing leather slippers over the flags. He went into the kitchen, lifted various jugs from the table, put a cigarette in his mouth, rattled a box of matches and, one arm on the table steadying himself, lit up, head down. This was the way the day starts. He showered, dressed and came over to say hello. ‘Mike Chesterton. I’ve been drunk three nights running and I’m supposed to be going out tonight.’ He spoke the informal English of a native speaker. We shook hands.

‘My family’s all English, my mother was British Consul to Peru, just retired. It had its perks,’ he nodded at a strong pair of mustard coloured hiking boots, about size twelve.

‘They belonged to a British motorcyclist who was touring the highlands. He hadn’t planned to go to Titikaka, but, on a whim, he detoured to take it in. On a blind bend he met a truck on the wrong side of the road. Flattened. Body came to the consulate. Family didn’t want the clothes sent home, no one else had feet this size. I’m actually Peruvian, born here, got both passports. What a country. No money, no work. I’ve trained as an electrician, done cavity walling, you name it. I’ve got to get back to Lima, out of money here.’

‘It’s not your hostel then?’

He nearly choked laughing.

‘Belongs to Aldo, my best mate since we were kids, he’s an artist. I’m a free guest. I’m off to England the end of the month, I’ve got family in London and Plymouth, loads
of family. Where are you off to?’

‘Huancavelica.’

‘Poorest town in Peru. Worse than here, nothing.’

He put The Who’s
Tommy
on the hi-fi. ‘Never dates, does it?’

A sign at the edge of Huancayo says
Welcome to the Wanka Nation
. Huanca, as in Huancayo, has been changed from a Spanish spelling to a supposedly neutral Wanka, although, because there was no indigenous script, this just means exchanging one set of foreign phonetics for another. And making the double entendre more blatant. Let’s get it over with. You can come to the land of the Wankas, stay at the Hostal Wanka, play football for Deportivo Wanka, shop at Big Mama Wanka’s gift shop, e-mail home from Cyberwanka, before visiting the nearby town of Wanka-rama. When I met another British tourist in a bar I said, ‘It’s hard not to tell the locals what it means in English.’

He said, ‘Oh really? I bring it up at every opportunity.’

The people who make the best gourds live in the villages of Cochas Chico and Cochas Grande. I crossed Huancayo’s attractive modern plaza. I was startled out of my wits by the opening choral movement from
Carmen Burana
exploding at high volume from nowhere. Starved of good music, I sat on a bench watching the high fountains dance. The fountains and the music died, suddenly stopped by their timing device, and I could see the concealed loudspeakers. Near the bus stop were raised flowerbeds. In the centre of one, the morning sun lit the cheeks of a bare arse, belonging to a drunk who had spent the night face down with his trousers at half-mast. We bounced our way out of town and up a dusty track through sleepy villages. The driver yelled, ‘
Caballero!
Here!’ and pointed to a café. Miriam, at the counter, told me she was twenty-two, but she looked much younger. She handed her baby to a ten-year-old, barefoot in a red tracksuit. ‘She’s my youngest sister, she’s just learning. We buy the gourds from traders who come up from the coast. The best are called
amarillos
’ (yellows), ‘they are free of imperfections and ready to use, and cost two soles.’ She held up a dry gourd the size of a Jaffa orange, its creamy-yellow skin smooth, almost polished. ‘For one sole, you can buy ones with flaws that have been cleaned up. But they are harder to work with, and more fragile. With an
amarillo
–’, I winced as she dropped the beautiful yellow gourd to the concrete floor, but it bounced around like a hard plastic ball, ‘– it won’t break. See! Not a mark on it.’

The room was full of finished gourds, every size from a hen’s egg to footballs. ‘Can I see you making one?’

‘Certainly.’

I expected to be taken to a workshop, with some kind of vice to hold the gourd, and a rack of tools. She picked up a half-finished one from the bench, and a two-inch nail, embedded in a chisel handle. Holding the gourd in one hand, she began pricking the surface, one minute flake at a time.

‘You don’t draw the pattern on first?’

‘No, I put in some lines which run round the whole design and divide the surface up into the main scenes.’

‘And the lines you are making are white, but in the finished ones they are black.’

‘Come with me.’

In the field at the rear, we knelt in the grass. She set out a little mutton fat, dry grass, a box of Llama brand
matches and a bucket of soapy water. ‘You rub the fat over the surface to seal the uncut surface. Then you burn the grass and rub the ashes over the pot, and into the engraved lines.’ She did so. ‘Then you wash the gourd.’ It took two minutes, start to finish.

‘How about the coloured gourds? Do you paint dyes onto the surface?’

‘No, they are burnt on.’ She took a thick twig and lit one end. ‘If you burn a little it goes dark yellow, a little more makes orange,’ she dabbed carefully at the surface, and blew on the ember again. ‘A little more and you get different browns, all the way through to black. We are lucky here, we have
queuña
trees, and the dry wood burns with very little smoke. Even so, in time, it hurts the eyes. My mother is the best carver in the family, her gourds have the finest detail, but she is forty and her eyes are weak from the smoke.’

They weighed next to nothing: I could buy some for Elaine, who loved them. I chose several, including an unusual one by Miriam’s mother. She had first dyed the gourd dark purple, then engraved the pattern, revealing the natural cream colour. The design showed seven llamas grazing beneath two trees high on a mountain, watched by a shepherd. Below, a man and a woman hoed a field by their houses, sacks of produce at their side. By a river, a spider’s web hung from flowers. This whole scene was just one inch square. Such work completely covered the applesized gourd. Miriam said it was four days’ work, and asked forty soles: two pounds a day. I didn’t quibble. ‘Would you write
Por Elaine
on the base?’

‘Certainly.’

She also added
Mi Amor
, blew it clean and smiled at
me. ‘I could see those words in your eyes!’

Down the hill, the family of Pedro Veli Alfaro was at work in the garden. They specialised in folklore tales. He showed me a gourd with four scenes showing two young peasants meeting and falling in love. ‘There, they go together to tell her parents that they want to be married, and you can see the father beating him; that is traditional.’

‘Because she’s pregnant?’

‘No, the father always beats the suitor, to show he values his daughter and doesn’t want to lose her. My wife’s father beat me just the same way!’

The other reason to come to Huancayo was to take the train to Huancavelica, a small town in a mountain culde-sac, founded by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo to extract mercury from the mountains. I left my main luggage in the hostel, a rare treat to travel light. Mike smiled when I told him where I was going. ‘You’ll be fine, I’m sure,’ he said.

I stood outside the station watching the red light rise on a mackerel sky, and sipping hot turnip tea. I used my torch to find my seat in the unlit train. The horn gave a melancholy bellow, and the train bucked into motion. The engine was a monstrous orange diesel: we rocked from side to side, as if bound to jump the tracks. The broad valley soon narrowed to a gorge where tiny fields clung to ledges on the walls, and wires with slings below ferried people and animals high over the raging torrent.

Opposite me sat a teenage boy with an Amazonian green parrot. The train’s horn triggered rainforest memories, and the bird answered with a deafening screech. If it was not fed constantly, it slipped its upper
beak into the corner of the boy’s mouth and bit his cheek so hard the boy whitened, but would not cry out. The stations rolled by: Manuel Tellera, Izcucach, Cuenca, Ccocha and Yaulli. Some were in open countryside, others served small towns whose food sellers swarmed aboard with bread, pork ribs, maize and beans. Five hours later, a ramshackle town came into view, girdled by ulcerated hills. These hills were once vital to milking the wealth of the Americas. Viceroy Toledo brought the latest know-how for refining silver using mercury. The mercury mines of Huancavelica speeded production at the fabled Bolivian mines of Potosí. So much silver was taken from Potosí mountain that it was reduced in height and became a honeycomb. Six million natives died there; the natives called it The Mountain That Eats Men. The only mining done now in Huancavelica is unofficial; a few families scour the rotting galleries. It is dangerous work: the earth itself is poisonous.

The galleries were entered by a stone gate cut in the rock, and commanded by the royal coat of arms. Slave labour hacked out ore with crowbars. Each blow released four poisons: two forms of mercury, and two of arsenic. Crammed in, they toiled like ants, coughing up blood and mercury, and died in their thousands, depopulating the countryside for tens of miles around. Native writer Huaman Poma’s long letter to the King of Spain advised him of abuses that he was sure the good monarch would rectify if only his advisers would inform him honestly of affairs in Peru: a common misconception about absolute rulers. He offered plain advice about improving conditions in the mines. ‘The first point, Your Majesty, is to put a stop to the practice of hanging miners upside-down by
their feet and whipping them with their privates openly displayed.’ You can’t help thinking this is sound advice for labour relations in general.

I found a sunny room in a back-street hostel and went for a walk. The town’s colonial square had stately pines and a small, tiered fountain. I guiltily refused to have my boots cleaned by young boys with polish up to their wrists, because my boots are supposed to be treated to a special wax. The town was peppered with ancient churches in varying degrees of decay. The streets were full of offal scavenged by dogs.

Next day a small group of Swiss tourists arrived. Most tourists are very shy of the real Peru. The average tourist stays eleven days and visits only Lima, Cuzco and Machu Picchu. Among those who linger longer, the guidebooks have much to answer for.
Lonely Planet
carries an entry for each city called ‘Dangers and Annoyances’, which includes everything from altitude sickness to, in one town, serial rapists active in the area. Their authors obligingly look for things to fill it. Tourists are encouraged to use buses and taxis, not walk, and stick to places where there are other tourists: a reassuring face is one like yours. So guidebook backpackers follow the ‘Gringo Trail’ up and down Latin America, doing the picture postcard places, meeting the same travellers at each stop, avoiding serial rape after nine o’clock. Guidebooks simplify travel but they encourage honey-pot tourism; if you follow
Lonely Planet
, the one thing you’ll never be is lonely. On 700 miles of Inca roads, I never once met another tourist. They are all walking the thirty miles of Inca trail that lead to Machu Picchu, two hundred of them each day.

Huancavelica is definitely off the Gringo Trail, but is
recommended, to travellers with a little more time, for its unspoiled Colonial square. The Swiss party was four men and four women, mostly blond, and entirely immaculate. Like many people who arrive in a group, they stayed in one. Lone tourists are either lost or waiting outside a lavatory for their partner. All eight looked lost. They avoided eye contact, even with me; all comments were mouthed quietly into the shared space between them. Coming from a country that has been rich for three or four generations, they were uniformly tall; the shortest woman was taller than any local man. Skin cancer being unfashionable, they were the deathly pale of factor 30 applied as a face pack. They drifted along the street like aliens unsure whether to make themselves visible. They never looked happy.