The lost city, p.14
The Lost City, page 14
The padre shrugged. Then one day a farmer from the Tingo valley, a day’s drive from here, came to see me. I hear the padre is interested in antiquities, he says. He leads me up to the market where a truck is parked. He heaves out two sacks from the back. Look, señor. He opens one up and I just about jumped out of my skin.
Beltrán gestured behind him, at the mummies in the cases.
It was these two. But he wouldn’t tell me where he got them; I couldn’t get it out of him.
Beltrán shrugged. Forgive me. Here I am talking and talking. Come. Let us go back for some fortifications.
He led them back upstairs, and installed them again at the table, this time with a bottle of pisco.
You’ve got me talking. He smiled. It’s a long time since I had company from the grand monde. He poured out shots of the spirit.
Here, it’s hard enough to get anything to work today, let alone dig in the past. And it’s worse than ever. If there are any lost cities, they’re likely to remain lost. He sighed and lifted his glass. Anyway. To lost peoples. Why not?
Jackson and Sarah sipped their drinks. Beltrán threw his pisco down.
Excuse me rattling on. Still I haven’t let you say a word.
Beltrán topped them up and poured himself another shot. He paused and sighed. Yes, the padre agrónomo. They still do grow quinoa in some villages, you know.
He drained his little tumbler again and encouraged the two of them to do the same.
Jackson watched. The priest seemed agitated. Perhaps he had been feeling the lack of Western company, or perhaps something was on his mind.
Beltrán shook his head. But it’s sad these days. Just the other day another of the farmers came to me. He’s being forced to help these gun-runners now. If he doesn’t, he fears for his family. It’s lawless, it’s hopeless. I even went down to Trujillo not long ago to talk to the bishop about it. He just shook his head and muttered what difficult times these are, and the Church must forgive. Sad times, sad times: that’s all the bishop would say. I think the bishop himself is a sad man. How does a man get like that? By making the wrong compromises. We all have to learn the compromises we should and shouldn’t make.
Anyway, one last thing. The padre fixed Jackson with his eyes. I do not advise you to go looking for La Joya. If it is there at all, it is in such a remote place there are only two or three campesinos who could guide you. Excuse me, one of them was killed last month—a young man too. So there are two at most. One you cannot approach, he has become a henchman of Señor Carreras—of whom I assume you have heard—and the other is uncertain. He claims to be resisting what he calls powerful temptations, but I don’t know whether to believe him. He can tell I am not sure. Once he knows I doubt him, what sway I have is lost. You see, there is a war going on here, the same there has always been, for the human soul. Even in the little villages with their infernal superstitions it is being waged.
Beltrán filled his shot glass to the brim once more, and although his hand shook only a little as he picked it up, it lapped over his fingertips.
So I don’t know who you can trust to guide you. But worse, these are bad times. You cannot imagine. Last month an adulterer was dragged into the plaza of Pachatin, only an hour from here, and stoned to death. Stoned. In front of everybody. They call it justice, revolution, Marxism. As if Marx would ever have condoned medieval brutality like that. Yes. It seems the bad times are returning. That is what we dread most. Then they got the woman. First they cut off her hair and then—excuse me, señorita, he said without looking at Sarah—they cut off her breasts, and then they heated a hand-plough in a fire. I won’t go on. She was dead in an hour, thank God, but what an hour.
The region is going mad. Carreras is a drug lord pure and simple, but he lets these rivals fight it out—the guerrillas, the Marxist terrorists, the traficantes. Carreras keeps them at loggerheads, as you say. So then he is the one in control. They say he murdered his brothers and now sleeps with their daughters. Who knows if it is true? But it might be. He has houses in Lima and Miami, he has friends in the government. The police are no use; they are in his pay too. The local captain is his proxy, you could say. I don’t think that if you go looking for the city of La Joya you will find it. You’re not the first to try. Why should you, a young adventurer with nothing but his bold spirit on his side?
He looked sharply into Jackson’s eyes. Jackson winced as those hard pupils settled on him, as if the padre was searching to see just how bold his spirit was.
But I do think that if you venture out of the valley of the Tingo, beyond the pass, into the cloud forest round Choctamal, you will not come back.
Beltrán cleared his throat.
But forgive me, time has flown. I must let you get on. You will probably wish to visit the little fiesta tomorrow. And you can see our own little Chachapoyan ruin. Perhaps you can tell us what it is. We will meet later, I am sure. And Ignacio will visit again tomorrow? Please be careful, both of you. Oh yes, I almost forgot, tomorrow morning you must come to the opera.
The opera? Sarah said.
We have our little opera season here. Once a week we play a film, I have a friend in the capital who sends them to me on the truck, and we show them in the parish hall on Wednesday mornings. Come.
It’s a film? Sarah asked.
Yes, an opera film. We are having an opera phase. We try to keep civilised here. Tomorrow is The Magic Flute. He smiled. Ignacio can help me and Felipe with the projector. Would you like that?
Ignacio stared first at him, then at Jackson.
The padre added: And I never even knew you could get operas on film.
4
Chachapoyas. Tuesday night.
I feel like writing this diary again. It’s been a while.
The relief of being up here again. It’s indescribable. I guess it’ll be short-lived but I don’t care. I love it. This is what you do on the plain that opens before you after a big break-up: pause for breath, as and when you can. You go away. You get a change of air. It’s like a relief between marches. (But what drives the march? That’s the question, and the solution probably, to the whole messy game. A game you find yourself caught in, though you never asked to join. And you have to discover the rules by yourself as you play.) Sometimes, like now, a gamble pays off out of the blue. This trip is so helping me.
There’s a guy I’ve met. He’s strange. He’s doing strange things, has done strange things. Like he was in the army. I mean—of all avoidances. But he’s bright. He thinks for himself. I like that. Funny how some people can just interest you. For no apparent reason. He’s not living like anyone else I know. Though he’s foreign too, which may be part of it. English. I think that counts as foreign. He’s looking for these ruins he’s heard about. Up in the cloud forest. In an area near where Uncle Alfred lives. I think we’re going to go up there together. We might. We could. I’m kind of excited. I was anyway, to be going up there, but even more so now. There’s something peculiar about him, I don’t know quite what.
I guess the strange thing is not whether he’s bright or unusual or talented (which he is: he draws beautifully, though he hardly seems to know he’s doing it, and doesn’t think anything of it), but the way we feel together. I mean the way the two of us feel. Not like it was with Hayden. It’s subtle but there it is: it’s as though we understand each other without saying a word. It makes me feel calm and excited at the same time.
The landscape here must be part of why I love it so much: severely dry, bald as a monk’s head. This town is still not so easy to get to. Here and there you can see where the railway used to run, a pencil line drawn over the hills which might be erased at any moment, winding along troughs and gulfs, stitching in the southern edge of town.
It’s a good place to have come. I love the remoteness. You feel you have escaped something, just to be here.
Sarah met Jackson in a café the next morning. They had a cup of coffee while she tried to persuade him to come to the padre’s film.
I’ve got things I should do.
What things? Come on. You’re a visual guy. It will feed your vision. I promise.
It turned out she was right. Jackson was spellbound, sitting on his hard bench in the empty hall. There were only half a dozen other people press-ganged in by the padre, who had been hoping for more, to judge by the number of benches he had set out. The film played on a bedsheet hung from a wire. The projector clicked and rattled as the bands of gold and blue light twitched in the mote-thick dark overhead.
The film director spent a long time studying the faces in the opera audience, as the orchestra ran through the overture. Normally one might glance round an audience and notice none of the individual faces. Now they all looked so different from one another. They were like paintings, portraits to gaze at as the music cantered along.
Then the action started. As the actors in their rich costumes sang, the director closed right up on them so you could see the muscles of their necks working. It was irresistible. It wasn’t just the colours, the movement, the joyous music running like a brook through the dark hall, it was the intelligence—he couldn’t think what else to call it—of the man who had made the film. The camera moved with such good sense, as if there was a point to every shot. He wasn’t just reporting, he was arguing, proving something. If you tried to track down what he was saying, you couldn’t, but you could still feel it.
Jackson came out stunned and confused into the brilliant mountain daylight.
He frowned. What was that? That was unbelievable. I didn’t think I liked opera.
At once he wanted to run and grab his sketchbook. But what to draw? He wanted to see if he could capture that same kind of intelligence on paper somehow. Why not? It was no one’s possession. You didn’t have to have been to college to recognise it, evidently. It was some kind of horse sense. It seemed to make the sun shine in your mind.
They left Ignacio to help clear up the hall with Beltrán, and Jackson promised to come and see him later on.
5
That evening, in the faint light of a half moon, he and Sarah walked up over a rise at the edge of town and came upon the fiesta of San Agustín. Rough canvas stalls covered the field, all lit by kerosene lamps within so they shone like lanterns. Beyond the tents, each with the rushing hiss of its gas cooker, and the crackle of meat on its oildrum grill, and floodlit columns of grey smoke rising among them on the breeze, beyond all that stood a tremendous wall of masonry. It had holes for beams, and holes where windows had been and, with the moon shining from behind, the wall took on the aspect of a row of giants standing arm in arm; a row of paper men. They pertained to a different scale, standing there above the merrymaking of the humans.
Jackson stopped Sarah with a touch on the arm. They both looked for a while at the strange monument, dark blue in the midst of a spill of milk along the horizon from the lowering moon.
Sarah chuckled. I forgot to mention that. Chachapoyas’s own ruin. No one knows what in God’s name it is. A temple, a meeting house, a barn—no one has a clue.
They were making their way down the rocky slope on the far side of the brow, thrown into blackness by the bright field of lights ahead, when a small figure appeared to one side, scuttling down the scree nimbly as a goat. He ran diagonally down to cut them off, and stopped in front of Jackson. He was breathing hard.
I don’t believe this, Jackson said, and slapped his forehead.
It was Ignacio.
I had to get away. El gato needs something to eat. I’ve been looking for you everywhere, then I thought maybe one of the señoras at the fiesta will give me something.
Jackson sighed. Does the padre know you are here?
Ignacio stared at the ground.
Don’t go leaving the padre now.
The boy didn’t move.
I mean it. And I’ll talk to the padre about food for your cat.
Jackson was reminded of a dog they’d had when he was a boy. Whenever he tied it outside a shop it would lurch toward him on its leash, its whole body yearning to follow him. He would bend down and nuzzle it, and whisper that he’d only be a moment. The boy’s showing up here stirred the same tender feeling he used to have then. Jackson didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t see what else he could do than leave Ignacio with the padre.
Beyond the ruins the rooftops on the edge of town showed as a watery gleam in the moonlight.
The padre is a strange man, the boy said with an exaggerated inflection.
He is? Sarah asked.
He says he will make me clean the altar in the church every day. Two times all over, until everything is nice, he says.
Ignacio frowned seriously. I think he is un poco loco, señor.
Jackson glanced at Sarah, and she at him, and they both smiled.
Do you promise to stay with him even if he is crazy?
Ignacio stared at his feet.
Promise?
The word Sí dropped from his lips to the ground, as if by itself.
As they went down into the fiesta Sarah said under her breath, He’s one resourceful kid, that’s for sure.
And Jackson realised this was true, and that he hadn’t recognised it before.
They bought Ignacio a meal of pork sautéed with onions and tomatoes, along with an extra slice of meat that the woman at the stall wrapped for him in greased paper. They sat at a table under a canvas awning. A kerosene lamp hissed above them, hanging from the wood frame of the makeshift tent, dazzling them and seeming to make everything outside its reach even darker than it already was.
Later, they watched some folk dances on a makeshift stage under two spotlights. Men wearing fans of feathers blowing four-foot pan pipes swayed between women in billowing skirts. The dances seemed to lay bare a simple truth: here the men were, weaving between the women, showing off their prowess with the pipes, and eventually the two sexes paired off into couples, and trooped offstage. Soon enough, another dance would begin all over again. Whatever one thought, that was what life consisted of: having the skills to subsist, procreating and exiting. Meanwhile four men beat drums and shook gourds at the side of the stage. On and on the beat went.
They walked Ignacio back to the padre’s. Jackson hugged him at the gate into the alley, and promised to return soon, when he had finished his work in the cloud forest.
Ignacio said nothing.
It will just be two or three weeks.
Still Ignacio stood there silently.
Jackson bent down and embraced him again. The boy didn’t move or say anything. Jackson’s face grew hot. He touched Ignacio’s hair. Look after yourself.
Still the boy didn’t move. Jackson felt suddenly that he might either sob or laugh, and bit the inside of his cheek.
In the end they had to walk him down the alley and all the way up the stairs to Beltrán’s home.
8 • Journey
1
It felt so different to be travelling with someone. It was lucky too, a help. For example, Sarah knew there was a corner a few blocks below the market where the trucks left for Tingo.
There was something about her. She was fearless. Look at her now, heading toward the supposed no-go zone without a second thought, even if her uncle did live there. Things had changed since she’d last been there. And she travelled so light, with just a small pack, and lightly too in the sense of not laying down hard and fast plans, being ready to skip about and change them. Like the way she had come up to Chachapoyas so soon, so unexpectedly, to help him with Ignacio. It made the world feel both broader and simpler.
Tingo, three hours to the south, wasn’t much of a town: a single main street with a couple of restaurants, a bar and a tumbledown hotel. The driver pulled up outside a café. Behind it the valley fell away, but you couldn’t see it for the thick verdure behind the houses. In the early twilight the dust of the street had turned pale, and the waxy subtropical leaves of the trees seemed to grow both stronger in colour, and darker.
Sarah and Jackson climbed out and paid the driver.
You can stay at the hotel, the driver said, lifting a hand listlessly from the steering wheel.
It was already too late in the day to set out on the hike into the cloud forest.
As they strolled down the street with their packs Sarah said, I guess we might be able to get to Uncle Alfredo’s in a day from here. If we leave early enough. It’s a big climb to the pass but after that it’s pretty easy.
How high is the pass?
Thirteen thousand feet.
Jackson groaned, and felt a little as if he were acting. They seemed to have become quite formal with one another. He was nervous too, and wanted to get back to the easy calm way of being with her.
We’re pretty low here, too, she said. As you can tell.
They were talking like a pair of climbers who had just met, and were planning some assault together. But it was true, the air of lower altitude was warm before nightfall and quite dank. Odours came now and then of blossom, fruit and a faint acridity of urine.
From my uncle’s place it’ll be another couple of days to where you’re going, I think, Sarah added.
The hotel had only one room left, an L-shaped one they had to share. Jackson spent half an hour pacing round the walls with a towel, swatting every faint shadow he could detect by the light of the dim bulb hanging in the middle. Some of his blows yielded smears of dark blood. Others released a faint whine in the ear that quickly became inaudible, and he would continue his stalking.
