Cloud Road (35 page)

I could start to think how I looked to the locals: tall, white, bearded, well clothed from head to foot, rich. What kind of a job is ‘writer’? Writing is not a job. I have no purpose here. Why don’t I walk back to Inglaterra? Why don’t I, at the very least, pay to have my boots cleaned?

I did. They shone.

Back in Huancayo, after an even longer and bumpier return train ride, Mike welcomed me back to the same room, with my pack and stick in the corner like two friends. He introduced me to Aldo, the owner. He was a warm, friendly man coming up to forty. ‘Come and join us for lunch, we’re cooking chicken properly, a
middle-eastern
recipe with rice.’

In a shop in Huancavelica, I had bought a book of writings honouring José Carlos Mariátegui, a writer who founded the Peruvian Communist Party and wrote, in a poem dedicated to another radical, ‘You are the light
which shines on the path.’ This supplied the name for the infamous Shining Path Revolutionary Movement.

I read on the sofa outside my room, drinking in the rich garden. It was an oasis in the city. I envied Aldo, pursuing his art, living in a beautiful old house.

That night I bought scotch and we stayed up drinking. Mike fetched a tiny bottle of
caña
. It was sickly sweet, and terrifyingly strong. I made it to my bed and only woke at midday. And then at two and four and six o’clock. I was exhausted. I managed to get out for tea and sugar-filled cake, then went back to bed and slept another twelve hours. No matter what I drink, I can always get up. Must have been the start of some bug. Not the
caña
. Honest.

Next night I cooked for Aldo, Mike and some female friends, connections uncertain. I missed real cooking, and the market heaved with every animal, fruit, vegetable and spice of the Sierra and the coast. Among the sad caged falcons and the fat rabbits looking nervously up at them, I found all the ingredients to cook Indian: lamb jalfrezi. At four, I began boning a lamb shoulder and ribs. ‘Is there a sharp knife?’

Mike, not Aldo, came to look. ‘Possibly not, the truth is he doesn’t know what he’s got at the moment, his wife left him a month ago. She took stuff, he’s still not sure what.’ He stood up. ‘I know!’

He went to his bedroom and came back with a commando knife.

The meal was planned for eight o’clock, but the altitude wrecked that. The rice alone took an hour and forty minutes. We ate at eleven. I don’t know how much that meal cost Aldo in bottled gas. Meanwhile Mike said, ‘I’ve got something to show you.’ He took out photographs of a
large orange engine standing in gravel at the edge of the Huancayo to Huancavelica railway line.

‘1998. We were on a day trip. One of the few places it could jump the track without falling a thousand feet. Thought I’d wait until you got back.’

At dawn, I boarded the bus for Ayacucho. It was the last real city before Cuzco, and a centre of rich cultures going back long before the Incas. It was also at the heart of a twelve-year campaign of terrorism which engulfed Peru in blood, and brought the country to its knees, until a Japanese former academic took office.

Ayacucho’s ill-lit streets felt medieval, leading me, beneath rough-cut stone walls pierced by dramatic stone gateways, past lumpen doors set with brass studs and iron bars, up to the main square. There was a sense of bustle, of people moving with purpose, as if time mattered. The dramatic colonial square revealed exciting glimpses of Inca-built masonry buried in ground-floor walls. Under the dramatic chiaroscuro colonnades, well-dressed people ate things that weren’t chicken and chips, sipped red wine and dabbed white napkins, making tiny rose stains. I joined in. A decade before, we bourgeois would all have been butchered.

Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. A government that ignores a section of its citizens gifts them to its enemies. Successive Lima governments have ignored the highlands in general, and the southern highlands in particular. Ayacucho, which means Corner of the Dead,
has been a centre of resistance to this discrimination. In the 1960s, it was one of the poorest and most backward regions of the country. Nearly 70 per cent of the population were illiterate, and infant mortality was the highest in the world. One of the few things Lima ever did to promote the region’s economy was to re-open the university in 1959: ironic because into the philosophy department came Abimael Guzmán. Born in a hamlet near the southern city of Arequipa, in 1934, he was the illegitimate son of a middle-class wholesaler. He complained that his father would not pay for private schooling. But he always had more pocket money than other students, which he did not share, but spent on ice cream. Other Peruvian revolutionaries had aired their arguments among intellectuals, or targeted miners and factory workers, but Guzmán mobilised the rural poor. The education the Shining Path gave them was often their first.

Their campaign went public one eerie morning in Lima, on Boxing Day 1980. The city woke to find black dogs, their throats slit, hung from the lampposts of the capital, beneath placards reading ‘Son of a Bitch’. It was a crude attack on Deng Xiaoping, who was leading Chinese reforms of Mao’s doctrines. The Shining Path had not been able to find enough black dogs to kill, and had painted others black before cutting their throats. Guzmán was no anthropologist, but by luck, he had tapped authentic Andean resonances: the Wankas worshipped a dog-god, and the sacrifice of dogs was widespread. Had he truly understood the indigenous culture, and exploited its symbols effectively, he would have taken the country.

José Carlos Mariátegui, whose poem gave Shining Path
its name, had argued ‘The force of revolutionaries is not in their scholarship; it is in their faith, in their passion, in their will. It is a religious, mystical, spiritual force. It is the force of the Myth.’ The Maoist ideal, where struggle was rewarded by Utopia, chimed with Andean views of cyclic time, where distinct historic periods were interspersed with
pachakuti
, episodes of violent overthrow. Other myths were resurrected by the Shining Path: that white men were witches,
pishtacos
, who killed Indians for grease from their bodies, an idea that encapsulated real exploitation in a mythic image. From now on, to call someone a
pishtaco
was to announce their death sentence. As well as offering political education, Shining Path won peasant support by providing them with armed protection against cocaine traffickers. They charged the traffickers to do business with the growers, grossing up to $30 million a year. Growers learned they could trust Shining Path more than the police, who often cut their own deals with drug barons.

But the Shining Path’s main business was to destroy the state to clear the ground for revolution, in Peru, and around the world. Guzmán and his followers seized Ayacucho in March 1982, flinging open the jails. Guzmán immediately withdrew; by the end of the year the police no longer dared go into the countryside, and stayed in town getting drunk with prostitutes. The government stripped responsibility for combating terrorism from the Civil Guard, and gave it to the army. Results were wanted, the means didn’t matter. The army proved that with their greater resources, they could repeat the police’s ill-judged tactics on a much grander scale. A war that had cost two hundred lives in the first three years brought over 7,000
dead in the next two. The tourist train to Machu Picchu was blown up, killing seven passengers and scuttling Peru’s fastest expanding economic sector. Journalists and foreign hikers were found ritually killed and buried face down, their eyes gouged out, and the sockets plugged with corks, to prevent their spirits recognising the killers. Their ankles were broken so they could not follow their killers and haunt them, their tongues were cut out so they could not name them. By late 1991, a US business risk assessor designated Peru the most hazardous country in the world to invest in. The economy was in ruins, and public health fell so low that cholera, a disease unknown in Peru since the nineteenth century, struck a quarter of a million people.

The arrival of President Fujimori in office in 1990 signalled a more determined assault on Shining Path. The conclusion was not a climactic gun battle, but a quiet arrest, the reward for unglamorous, painstaking police work. In 1992, detectives followed a Shining Path member to a safe-house in a Lima suburb. In the household rubbish, they found the brand of cigarettes smoked by Guzmán, and empty tubes of the cream he used for his psoriasis. Guzmán went quietly, advising his followers to give up the struggle. In his fifteen-year wake, he left 35,000 dead and a poor country $25,000 million poorer.

The final leg of my journey would begin tomorrow and end in the Temple of the Sun, Cuzco: the Inca Empire’s holy of holies, where the son of the sun walked the earth, and I would take my dust. There was a final night to say goodbye to Ayacucho. In the main square, a service was finishing in the great cathedral; behind it, a roller of orange cloud hung like frozen surf. I walked towards it,
out through the suburbs, into the surrounding desert. These are the nights when the hills lie dreaming. A meteorite buries its heat in the desert, and a lizard kicks dust over the star-travelled haematite.

The modern road south to Cuzco bypasses what is now the small town of Vilcashuaman, or Sacred Falcon, but I wasn’t going to miss it. I could reach it from Ayacucho in a morning, stay overnight and return the following day. Built at the crossroads of the Royal Highway and the road from Cuzco to the coast, Vilcashuaman was regarded as the centre of empire. The battered Toyota minibus climbed for the first two hours. On the
altiplano
, at nearly 14,000 feet, a peasant family worked barefoot treading
chuños
, in a stream and on the bank. Two species of potato grow at high altitude; both are very alkaloid and hence bitter. Andeans expose the harvested potatoes at night to freeze, before trampling them and leaving them in running water to leach out the alkali. After three weeks they are retrieved and dried in the sun. The first time I ate them I thought they were poorly rehydrated dried kidneys. They are an acquired taste which I haven’t acquired.

Small groups of flamingos speckled the lakes. Austral thrushes dabbed at the yellow flowers of prickly pear. The coach was warm and stuffy. First the babies fell asleep, then the old people, and the men coming home from labouring, and the new-born lamb brought on by a man with a vacant, share-cropper stare, who wrapped it in his windcheater, and gave it his thumb to suck. Then me.

Vilcashuaman sits on a ledge commanding two great valleys. In Inca times, it had seven hundred households and palaces so magnificent that forty men were employed solely as gatekeepers. The main square has been modernised; a passable statue of an Inca in full regalia commands the centrepiece. It supposedly has 4,000 inhabitants, but if they had told me eight hundred, I would find it easier to believe. On the far side of the square stood the ruins of the temples of the sun and moon. The golden image of the sun that stood here was one of the most splendid in all Peru. The complex rises through four irregular terraces, the lowest of which is a retaining wall made from exquisitely fitted polygonal stones. On top of the terraces, tawdry and cheap, is the parish church of John the Baptist, a stone shed with a stick-on façade facing the plaza. If the Catholic Church had any sense of shame, it would tear it down.

Small children ran to me and asked if I had seen the monkey or the llama: faint carvings scattered around the site. They towed me around by my sleeve; it was a pleasant town to walk about, with sudden glimpses of terracing which used to surround the much greater Inca square. By one, an ancient woman reached up to pull scraps of grass for her donkeys. I could reach much lusher grass, and stopped to help. She spoke only Quechua and
an imperfect palate gave her a severe speech impediment. She chatted away while I smiled and filled her red apron with green.

You learn degrees of poverty. Vilcashuaman was very poor. Most people wore clothes that were worn ragged at the cuffs. Holes in woollens were not darned, shoes were scuffed and split. Some men lounged against walls, sunning their bones, or moved firewood on thin donkeys; but many just stood and stared like cattle. There was nothing for them to do. A few soles would buy a bottle of oblivion. A drunken soldier tottered after me, his swollen face the colour of a freshly punched eye. His cracked baritone voice, honed with cigarettes and spirits, bellowed at me to stop and talk, kill some of his time; crush out a stub of his boredom.

I slipped into a grocery, and drank a beer at the counter with the forty-year-old man who owned it. He tried to keep his daughter’s pet parrot out of the sacks of grain.

‘There doesn’t seem to be much money here,’ I said.

‘There’s much more now than there used to be.’

‘What is it spent on?’

‘Well, they’ve renovated the square and put up the statue,’ he looked a little rueful, ‘that’s it.’

Next morning I rose in darkness, and walked along the bottom of the square. In a black alley was a cobbled yard, called Ima Sumaq, beautiful place. An old man in a poncho crouched, half asleep, at the foot of a gateway. I passed through it and up a steep stair to the top of the only step pyramid in Peru preserved intact. Fifty feet high, it is complete in almost every detail. The high stone steps were made slightly too large for mortals. On top, facing due east, was a plain double seat cut from a single slab of
stone: the throne of the Lord Inca. It was once covered in gold, and decorated with precious stones, for Pachakuti Inca Yupanqui, who raised this temple about two generations before the conquest. He was a tall and
round-faced
man with a vile temper, who loved war, and was a glutton for food and drink. He personally added this area to the empire, besieging the locals who had fortified their position on this high, easily defended ledge, and had to be starved out. Cieza de León heard two conflicting traditions about their surrender: he either killed them all or spared them all.

Darkness was easing, cocks crowed, but the sun was not yet over the high hills to the east of the town. I could now see the breath of cattle in backyards, snorting the morning air. I waited, quite alone. I sat in the Inca’s cold seat and watched the rim of the hill begin to blur, and burn. More than 180,000 dawns have passed over this sacred seat. Soon, the sun god came. I closed my eyes and welcomed the heat.

Before returning to Ayacucho, I stopped at the village of Vischongo, just a few miles up the valley. There was a short street with a tiny square at one end, like a topiary maze. I needed a local guide to take me up the hillside above, to the mountainside of Titankayo’q. I drank lemonade outside a shop, sitting on furniture homemade from strong round poles pocked with teardrop markings. It wasn’t true wood; it came from
Puya raimondii,
one of the world’s oldest plants, and the world’s largest bromeliad, a group that includes pineapples. They carry the biggest flowering stalk of any plant on earth. The plant takes a hundred years to mature, before throwing a giant flowering spike over thirty feet high into the air, with
20,000 blooms on it. It lasts three months, surrounded by clouds of hummingbirds, then dies, its energy spent on one titanic flowering. It was discovered by the nineteenth-century Italian geographer and naturalist Antonio Raimondi, a man who famously highlighted the gap between Peru’s rich past and current poverty, calling Peruvians ‘beggars on golden stools’.

Eduardo, aged fourteen, and Francisco, twelve, agreed to take a rest from street football and show me the greatest forest of
Puya raimondii
in the world. We climbed to a hidden gulch called Cceullaccocha, and bore up it, following an irrigation channel perched high on its side. The air was heavy with insects, including some very large bees. After an hour Eduardo called out, ‘There!’ High on the other side of the valley, on a ridge eerily reminiscent of Arthur Conan Doyle’s
The Lost World,
was a plant the size of a young palm, silhouetted against the sky. A single globe of sabre-like leaves burst from the top of a stumpy trunk.

It was early August, the height of the dry season. We had climbed three thousand feet, much of it in heat unrelieved by a breeze. Twenty minutes more, climbing a slope as steep as a ladder, brought us to the first seedling. It was the size of a football, and still to grow a trunk, but razorwire spines already covered the red and green leaves. Eduardo climbed ahead, but young Francisco and I were struggling with the effort and the altitude. Above us, we could now see groves of these strange plants with their elephant’s trunk boles, and sea-urchin crowns.

‘Do you want to go further?’ called Eduardo. ‘They don’t get any denser than this.’

Interesting though all the other facts about the plants might be, there was one reason I had climbed painfully up
here to look at them. ‘I’d like to see one in flower,’ I said.

Eduardo sank me with a word: ‘September,’ he called, ‘they don’t begin flowering until September.’

I knew they flowered in waves, one plant triggering ripples of flowering and fruiting in the dry, open glades around it. But I did not know this was seasonal. If there were to be no flowers, I thought I might as well enjoy a real view of the forest. We were soon above the steep valley sides and emerging onto the gentler top slopes. Occasionally in Peru, it took no effort at all to imagine you were surveying an alien planet, and alien life. We were on a broad finger of high land linking up with many others. They were covered with the 200,000 specimens that survive here. Like date palms, the outer part of the plants’ trunks consists of the stumps of the fallen leaves, overlapping like fish scales. The insulation this provides is highly resistant to its main enemy: fire. But man has discovered the fibrous core is flammable. In a land with little timber, this unique reserve is being cropped for fuel.

Through this open forest came a noise I had never heard before. When the breeze was low, it was a whispering of desiccated tongues. When the wind swept down from the bleak bald mountaintops, the rustling of the hard, sharp fronds suddenly surrounded us; a
long-dead
army trying to unsheathe brittle swords.

Then Eduardo and I called out together, and pointed. ‘Flowers!’

Three of them. Despite the altitude, I swear I ran.

‘So early! They were not here last week, we came for a walk, there was nothing!’

The highest spike had reached ten feet, the flowers still tightly closed, but I had my sight of it. The emerging
flower stalk was the colour of young whitebeam leaves. I looked around and saw the kind of view that I would soon be leaving behind, mile upon mile of mountains. The route down: reluctant feet.

From Ayacucho I made trips to the old Wari capital, sprawling ruins on a bald hill, still only partly excavated. At its heart is a strange D-shaped temple, including a courtyard that may have been flooded. The original local Wari people formed a substantial local culture, but foundered, probably because of disastrous El Niño years.

A further bus ride brought me to the small village of Quinua. Late in 1824, superior Spanish forces were stalking the republican army led by Sucre, one of Bolívar’s ablest and most loyal generals. When he reached Quinua, Sucre was tired of running. On 9 December 1824, he turned his 5,800 patriot troops and a single cannon to face 9,300 Spaniards with eleven cannons, who had seized the hill above a small ledge on the valley-side, called Condorcunca: Worthy of the Condors. The Spanish army was under the direction of Viceroy La Serna himself, answerable only to the king. The Spanish battle plan was sound. Their infantry would attack the weakest patriot troops: the right flank. Then when Sucre moved troops from the centre to shore up the flank, the Spanish cavalry would charge the weakened centre.

In the centre of the patriot army Sucre’s youngest general, Córdoba, waited on horseback, in front of his infantry. The battle began as planned, until the Spanish
cavalry, eager for glory, charged before Sucre’s transfer of troops to the flank was effected. Seeing the game, Sucre ordered his central men to remain, and his weak flank to fight to the death. In a breathtaking show of leadership, young Córdoba dismounted in front of his infantry, and killed his own horse, declaring ‘I want no means of escape from this battle. Advance to victory!’ The Spanish cavalry charge was not met by cowering, weakened infantry, but by a phalanx of men advancing on them, long lances ready to spear the horses. Those brave men marched through the heart of a cavalry charge, and came out the other side. In half an hour, they fought their way up the hill and seized the Spanish artillery. The battle fell to Sucre and decided the fate of Spanish America, giving unstoppable momentum to the liberators. An empire surrendered; independence was theirs.

The village of Quinua has gone back to sleep. In a bare room in a modest house on the pretty village square was a broad stone post on which the Spanish surrender was signed; it is dark with the grease of affectionate touches. I added mine. The South American liberators took their ideological inspiration from the European Enlightenment: from Montesquieu, Voltaire and above all Jean-Jacques Rousseau. They crudely tried to apply European solutions to emerging nations encompassing many races, tribes and cultures, each with its own history. Local bosses soon held great power. Many were thugs; when the parents of strongman Juan Facundo Quiroga refused him a loan, he set fire to them. Men like him wanted more power, not democracy and liberty. As for the Indians, there was nothing in the well-thumbed Enlightenment works sitting on the desks of the liberators to help them: Montesquieu,
Hume and Bacon all denied Indians were human. Consequently, the first constitution prohibited them from learning to read and write, owning land or practising any profession with a title. Slavery was abolished briefly, but restored in fear that Peruvian industry could not sustain both profits and wages. For the ordinary Sierran, little changed in the century of liberation, or in the next.

After four and a half months’ travelling, I was only two days from my final destination, Cuzco, the sacred city. At 6 a.m. I stood in the dusty yard of Chankas Transportes, and watched a peerless blue sky become tinged with pink in the east. We were still in town when we stopped for clutch problems solved quickly with a hammer. Soon we pulled over to extract a bolt from a tyre as smooth as a billiard ball. As we left town, an old man at the roadside stared at the bus. When he saw me, he drew his finger across his throat.

We climbed on and on, above precipices which only reminded me of the smoothness of the tyres. The southern Sierra is rich in cactuses. Specimens of
Opuntia floccosa
looked like baby hedgehogs wrapped in cotton wool. Alpacas were more common, the least elegant of all the camelids of South America. A tourist asked me, ‘How do you tell llamas from alpacas?’ I suggested, ‘If it looks like a llama, it is a llama. If it looks like a man in a bad llama outfit, it’s an alpaca.’ In late afternoon, we climbed through the base of light alto-cumulus cloud, then out into the sunshine above it. The nearer mountains were green, the further peaks faded to a cool forget-me-not blue and, beyond them, perhaps thirty-five miles off, were glimpses of lone fortresses glowing delicate purple. Descending back through the cloud, we entered the night.