Cloud Road (36 page)

I spent a day in Andahuaylas just because the hotel was comfortable. There was nothing to do there so I re-read my notes of the chroniclers, and dreamed of Cuzco. Another dawn, another bus yard. The young driver arrived forty minutes late, hair uncombed: ‘Sorry, overslept!’ He pulled straight out. We climbed above a fertile valley where a woman stood in a green diamond of grass, a baby in the shawl on her back. Only her fingers moved, spinning brown wool. A man and a boy cleaned clods of earth from an irrigation channel. Dark wet adobe bricks lay drying, like hairy liquorice. I looked down on them all, the lid taken off their lives for a few moments, then, over the shoulder of the hill, the high brown plains.

The ride from Andahuaylas to Abancay took in such violent changes of altitude that many locals were vomiting. This could be the only place in the world where you risk deep vein thrombosis on a bus trip. At one stop, a mother and daughter ran breathless down a hill to flag down the driver. Grubby from fieldwork, they carried a foot-plough and a jug stoppered with the core of a maize cob. At the next stop, a young mother climbed aboard, in spotless traditional clothes, her baby wearing a white lace bonnet, and strapped into a modern western baby-carrier. We were passing from the old countryside to the new tourist dollars of Cuzco.

Around twenty miles from Abancay, we picked up the River Apurímac or Great Speaker. In an arid canyon, candelabras of saguaro cactus towered above the broken rocks. At the end of the dry season, the Great Speaker was whispering. In the section of canyon immediately above here stood the most famous bridge in all the Americas: the Bridge of San Luis Rey. It was famous for being a
continuation of the original Inca suspension bridge, made of ropes woven from cactus fibres. First built around 1350, it spanned the greatest river crossing between Cuzco and Cajamarca. It was 148 feet long, and suspended 118 feet above roaring water confined so closely that a mountain storm could make the river rise forty feet in a night. In Inca times, there were two bridges side by side: one for the Inca himself, and another for the rest of humanity. The cables from which it was suspended were as thick as a man’s body, and renewed every two years. They hung from rock platforms built on the canyon walls, and accessible only by tunnels. On one side was one of the empire’s holiest shrines, and a famous oracle, containing idols coated with golden robes and human blood. When the Spanish closed in on the temple, the priestess threw herself into the waters as a sacrifice to the river demon. Its reputation as a wonder of the New World was so great that Hiram Bingham, the rediscoverer of Machu Picchu, said it was one of the main reasons he came to Peru.

But the most famous thing the bridge ever did was fall down. It collapsed without warning, one hot Friday noon, on 20 July 1714, hurling five people to their death. The disaster was witnessed, from the hill above, by Brother Juniper, a small red-haired Franciscan from northern Italy. In five minutes more, he would have stood on the bridge himself. This was an act of God, and five died: why those? He decided it was a laboratory in which God’s purpose could be examined. In Thornton Wilder’s great book on the collapse,
The Bridge of San Luis Rey,
he wrote: ‘It was high time for theology to take its place among the exact sciences. If there were any plan in the universe at all, if
there were any pattern in a human life, surely it could be discovered mysteriously latent in those lives so suddenly cut off.’ Juniper wrote a large book chronicling the minute details of those five lives over six years, and concluded that in this act of God there was no sign of reward for merit, or punishment for sin. In fact, examining their lives and other deaths, it seemed the more virtuous were taken. The Inquisition read the book with great interest, and ordered it and Brother Juniper to be burned in Lima Square, which they were.

Just after five o’clock, the word Cuzco appeared, painted on the brown wall of an adobe house. We crested the hill and the whole city lay below, filling the valley floor, the suburbs rising up the surrounding hills. The western side was already in shadow, and the side-valleys were rippled with shade, but the old town’s terracotta roofs and sun-mellowed stones gleamed in the warm light of the setting sun. Beautiful, ancient Cuzco is the only city in Peru I could live in.

August is the city’s busiest month. In five minutes I saw more tourists than I had seen in five months. When I had come here two years before on a reconnaissance trip to some key sites, I had felt a rough, frontier edge to Cuzco. Now well-groomed businessmen and women chattered into mobile phones.

The street traders were all of Indian blood. At night, they departed, leaving tourists to the city-centre shops with plate-glass windows, security grilles and alarms, where their culture is re-packaged and sold by invaders and immigrants; by people in western dress, who have holidays themselves, and understand.

I was short of cash and nearly out of credit. I found an
old colonial hotel and shook my head at the seventy dollar-a-night prices. When they saw me move to leave, they took me to a row of budget rooms on the roof, letting for five dollars a night, and made a fuss of me throughout my ten-day stay. I headed straight for the Cross Keys bar with a balcony overlooking the Plaza de Armas, and ordered two
pisco
sours. You can taste the brandy, lemon and sugar, and see the crushed ice, but the ingredient you don’t guess, which makes it work, is raw egg white. I picked up one
pisco
, chinked the other glass: ‘Elaine!’ I stole the idea from Raymond Chandler. I wished above anything that she could be back with me where we had sat two years before, prospecting this trip, sipping
piscos
, to look out over the Plaza de Armas, which, by night, is the best of all Peruvian squares. The Cathedral and two other great churches, El Triunfo and La Compañia, are floodlit; the remaining sides are filled by colonial buildings with balconies, which make handsome and convivial bars and restaurants. Car horns are banned, the fountain in the centre of the gardens dances and you congratulate yourself for simply being here. Elaine knew how much this had meant to me and had tramped long miles to be with me. She knew it mattered more than I could say, except, perhaps, in this book. It mattered more than I myself had realised, to put my romance for her on hold and live the romance of the journey, put myself on the line and push my body to the limits of pain and endurance. Something she did not feel the need to do. I drank the second pisco. Elaine was a long journey away.

I found a call centre and called her from a stuffy booth. She sounded surprised to hear from me at first, and apologised over her shoulder to a woman whose voice I
didn’t recognise. She turned her mouth back to the phone: ‘You made it, Cuzco! Has it changed much?’

‘Seems smarter, but I think that’s just because I’ve been in the wilds so long. Is that Pat?’

‘No, someone you don’t know; we walk the dogs at the same time.’

I wanted to reminisce about our time here but felt constrained by her speaking in someone’s company. The booth was becoming more claustrophobic with each breath. But I wanted something from her. What was it? Approval? Admiration? A kiss from the lips I could hear moving but could not touch? While we spoke, the texture of her silences on the phone changed, as if she sometimes had her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Speak again tomorrow, love,’ I ended, and hurried out, urgent for air.

Walking the streets, I tried not to let myself dwell on a conversation that had left me feeling flat. In the spaces and buildings about me, I pictured the titanic struggles that had taken place. Murderous civil wars between conquistadors followed the defeat of the Incas. They were terminated by ruthless administrators: the viceroys sent out from Spain to bring the country under civil rule. The man who finished the job, and himself in the process, was Francisco Toledo. When the last rebel Inca, young Tupac Amaru, was captured and brought to Cuzco, Toledo, without authority and with every senior churchman and dignity in the city begging him for mercy, executed him. He died with great dignity, after making a fine, thoughtful speech, telling his people that their gods were a fraud, their messages concocted by the royal family and their minions. He commended them to the religion of the men who taught him his catechism while building his scaffold.
As a reward to the Spaniards’ Cañari allies, Toledo let one of them flash the blade of Spanish steel down through the light, and send the young Inca into darkness.

Toledo ordered the head left in the square. A startled Spaniard looked out from his window that night. He had sensed some change outside, not a noise, but an atmosphere, a night-whisper. He started with shock. The huge square was a copper sea of heads bowed in silent worship. Each night, said the natives, the Inca’s head grew more beautiful.

Two regicides were too much for the Spanish king to tolerate, even if they were savage princes: ‘I sent you to represent a king, not kill one.’ Toledo’s career was over; disgraced, he soon died.

I strolled round the shadowy colonnades, bought a paper and found my favourite Mexican restaurant was still open, and, night after night, ate everything on the menu except chicken and chips. I went back to my room, and smelled all the things that had become so familiar, but were soon to be lost. On my clothes, pack and equipment were the sweat, earth and animal odours of the country. Strapped to the bottom of my pack was a souvenir woollen cinch with two iron rings and a strong odour of donkey.

Cuzco vies with Mexico City for the distinction of being the oldest continuously inhabited city in the Americas, and the centre is marvellously preserved. In the morning, I found my hotel window overlooked a rippling sea of terracotta tiles, and through the open window came the music from
the shop next door: the haunting melody, ‘Llorando se Fue’ (‘Crying She Went’), my favourite Andean song. The tune would sound tantalisingly familiar to you. It was written in 1982 by the brothers Ulises and Gonzalez Hermosa, and recorded by their group. One day a friend rang them from Paris and held her phone to the television where they heard their tune. ‘Who’s playing it?’ they asked.

‘It’s the music for an Orangina advert.’ Someone had stolen the tune, and added a fashionable Brazilian beat and a new name: the
lambada
. It went on to sell fourteen million copies in five continents, the greatest selling single in the world that year. But the Hermosa brothers were not rustic folk musicians; they had registered their copyright. They sued for $5 million and won. Gonzalo was interviewed afterwards and said, ‘I still don’t want to learn to dance the
lambada
.’

I crossed the main square, climbing. The cathedral above me was built on the remains of the palace of Viracocha Inca. The rival Jesuit La Compañia church was to my right, and the long low porticoed colonial buildings closed in all the rest of the plaza. The original Inca square, a reclaimed swamp, was more than double the size. Before the city fully woke, I wanted to see the greatest of all Inca fortresses, Sacsaywaman, which stands on a hill above the north of the city. The bones of the past still surface in the city-centre streets. The base of the building to my left was made of perfectly cut stone courses. This was the Casana palace, home of the handsome, pale-skinned Wayna Capac, father of Atahualpa. It was the greatest of all the palaces, with a hall that could hold a thousand people. When Cuzco fell, Francisco Pizarro himself took it as a house. Pizarro remains a cipher, a man full of ambition,
steadfast purpose, but no destination. When he arrived, the city was already like a ship in the hands of breakers. He showed little interest in what it had been.

He had been an able and brave general, a leader able to hold together self-serving adventurers in the most daunting circumstances. But he was not skilled to fill the governorship he was awarded, nor did he have sufficient loyal men on the ground. He spent the rest of his life
rewinning
the conquest, fighting the native population, former comrades and belligerent new Spanish immigrants. Unlike a Bolívar, he lacked true vision; he knew soldiering, and he did it well. He understood booty, but not industry, nor government. He didn’t even display a peasant’s sense of good husbandry. Meat soon grew so scarce, unborn piglets sold for 16 ounces of gold, and once born were soon eaten.

Many conquistadors lived and died like gangsters, perishing in turf wars, feuds, vendettas, executions and jail. Of the Pizarros, Juan perished like a soldier, at Sacsaywaman, Gonzalo was hanged for rebellion, Pedro drifted from view. The only one who seemed to have enjoyed his money was Hernando, and he did so in the enforced leisure of a prison in Spain, after garrotting Diego de Almagro when he was a prisoner of war. In revenge, a posse of Almagro supporters stormed into Francisco Pizarro’s Lima palace, and, after a short struggle, killed him. He died making the sign of the cross in his own blood as a water jar was smashed onto his skull. His body was buried at night, in an obscure corner of the cathedral, by a Negro slave, working half-blind in the glimmer of rush tapers. His affairs were so disordered the funeral was at the public expense.

I sped up the narrow passageways, past Qoricalle, meaning Gold Street, and past the ancient palace of the second Inca, Sinchi Roca, who ruled around 230 years before the conquest, and up Resbalosa, Slippery Street, named for its smooth cobbles. These tight streets emerge onto an irregular plaza, in front of the church of San Cristóbal. Holding up the hill behind the church is a much more ancient wall, with twelve niches the size of large doorways. It was said to be built by the first Inca of all, Manco Inca, of whom it was said, ‘He lived to be old, but not rich’, perhaps because he spent his money building Qoricancha, The Temple of the Sun. On this spot he built his residential palace, Colcampata. Most visitors just walk on up the lane to the staircase that leads to Sacsaywaman. But a short walk down a track to the left brought me to a half-overgrown gateway, whose multiple jambs and lintels signified great prestige. This was once the gateway to the palace occupied by two puppet Incas, Paullu and Carlos, whose reigns as Spanish stooges lent them privilege but not power. In the undergrowth behind was a curious standing stone four feet high. Cutting back the vegetation I found that one side bore a carving of a frog or toad. Each year, in September, all ordinary work would stop. The Inca would come to this field and plant the first maize of the new season, turning the earth himself, identifying himself with the fertility of the land and the prosperity of the country, a role of kingship which goes back to the earliest known cultures along the Tigris and the Euphrates.