The gold machine, p.1
The Gold Machine, page 1
Praise for Iain Sinclair
‘Follow Iain Sinclair into the cloud jungles of Peru and emerge questioning all that seemed so solid and immutable. The Gold Machine made me angry, sad, envious of Sinclair’s beautiful, evocative prose and grateful that I did not have to endure a soroche headache to gain a new understanding of colonial attitudes and the damage we have done.’
Barry Miles
‘Iain Sinclair remains the reigning ambassador from the kingdom of books, a fifty-year argument for the practice and legitimacy of writing. The Gold Machine extends the argument. Sinclair and his daughter travel to Peru and re-create the colonial expedition of his great-grandfather, pathways laid out in the forgotten ancestor’s published works. This is what the template has always been, will always be. Find an old book, absorb its secret message, go outside and destroy yourself in its service. Brilliant.’
Jarett Kobek, author of I Hate the Internet
‘This is some of the best prose Sinclair has ever written – its poetic playfulness always in energetic tandem with razor-sharp observation. The book also transcends the genres you throw at it. It is a post-colonial essay haunted, if not deeply disturbed, by what the complex literary spirits of Conrad, Poe, Burroughs, Ginsberg and Ed Dorn bring to the party, a peripatetic séance in Amazonia often rudely interrupted by reality. This is an enthralling read.’
Paul Tickell, film-maker and journalist
‘Ceylon, Australia and Peru, as well as Dundee, Maesteg and, of course, Hackney too. The Gold Machine thrusts a sharp and revealing probe into the not always leafy heartlands of Britain’s imperial past. Perfect reading for anyone keen to understand how this history continues to weigh on the present, and a prophetic last word for those Brexit-crazed champions of “unwoke” England who refuse to accept that it is over.’
Patrick Wright, Professor (emeritus) of Literature, History and Politics, King’s College London
‘Sentence for sentence, there is no more interesting writer at work in English.’
John Lanchester
For Farne and Arthur Sinclair, their dialogue
CONTENTS
Glints
By the Brown River
Something out of Something Else
Dirty Sand
The Silence in the Forest
Frets
The Map on the Downstairs Wall
Visiting Agent
Passage Money
The Beast in the Jungle
Casement’s Camera
Guano
Tasmania
Hell’s Gates
Into the Interior
Fevers
The Advocate
Lima
Breakfast
Bones
Soroche
Convento de Santa Rosa de Ocopa
La Oroya
Tarma
La Merced
Furies
San Luis de Shuaro
Maria Genoveva Leon Perez
Lucho’s Farm
Cerro de la Sal
Pampa Michi
Bajo Marankiari
The Waterfall
Mules
Mariscal Cáceres
Pichanaki
Puerto Yurinaki
Cascades
Pampa Whaley
The Cage of Paper
Melbourne
Proxima Centauri
Solly Mander
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
I am the Gold Machine and now I have trenched out, smeared, occupied…
– Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems
After this road, what then? You’ve said it yourself, there’ll be another one like this. What then, Peru?
– Tim Binding, Beneath the Trees of Eden
He doesn’t have any family, he’s a writer.
– Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch
Glints
By the Brown River
I woke early on a bed of broken slats in a house on stilts, across the beaten dirt from a fast-flowing river. Less a house, in truth, than a bamboo-walled cabin with a red tin roof on which rain drummed at the appointed season. Sunrise and sunset were also predictable: a bleary six a.m. glance at my watch and a six p.m. nod, when cicadas launched their irritated summons to cloud jungle vespers. Darkness dropped like a theatre curtain. The shack had been built to accommodate visitors the villagers really didn’t want.
‘These people are basically shy,’ the anthropologist warned, ‘and that can manifest as disdain. They are fearful of psychic contact. And proud to the point of arrogance.’
We come as thieves disguised with gifts.
3,162 miles from Hackney. 152 miles from London to the mining town where I grew up. 389 miles from there to Aberdeen, the city from which my grandfather travelled to South Wales. We know how far we have come, but we don’t know why. Or how we can adapt to this place. Or who we are without familiar markers, the trees and stones and cracked windows that know us. That confirm our passage.
The long night, after the dogs had settled, was a wrestle under a snap-assembled mosquito net which made me feel like one of the black piglets we had seen in the animal market at Chupaca; wide eyes and pink snout pushing against the imprinting mesh of the sack, stoic before slaughter. Riverside insects were replete, otherwise engaged. In any case, I had a shirt impregnated with chemicals ninety-five per cent guaranteed to repel them. It was the five per cent, when I heard them fizzing against the television set, hung on the wall like an erased portrait of a forgotten ancestor, that kept me scrabbling to stay inside my claustrophobic coop. It would have been easier to sleep on the floor. The bed had two widely separated functional slats and a couple of others in critical disrepair. After a brief interlude the uneasy visitor, hungry for the respite of dreams, would sink through the gap, as through the boards of a rotten swampland coffin.
Rising in the privilege of the still sensational and pulsing dark, it was more appealing to step out for a piss among the trees than to paddle across a slaughter of muddy footprints to waterless en suite facilities. The only detail that offended me was the suspended television set. Electricity was an invasive and potentially lethal extra, flaring, even when switched off, in arbitrary revelation like a cheap headpunch vision, then flickering in frosty static and fading away. The presence of that screen, dripping with unattached wires, was a blatant attempt to turn part of the settlement into an adventure tour Holiday Inn. Even dead screens whisper. The villagers see us as white ghosts, hollowed of meaning. And they are justified in that.
In earlier times, when a member of the extended family sickened and died, they held the house responsible, burnt it down and moved on. An empty house prepared for some wealthy alien, a faceless stranger who may never come, is a dangerous thing. The face reflected in the TV screen when you try to flatten your hair before the communal breakfast stays in the screen after you depart.
There are chopped, stripped trees left on the ground to act as benches, entitled chickens are pecking the dirt around them. I don’t see any of the villagers about their business, but I know they are watching me. I amble out, not sure how to make a morning circuit of it, down the thin strip of beach. The sand is fine-grained, a mortuary grey. Fetched against a thick balsa pole, part of an uncompleted or washed-up raft, is a display of bright blue plastic bottles, silver cans, oranges, black bags, broken twigs and dead leaves. The hills on the other side are hidden in threads of fine white mist. I walk slowly as far downriver as the beach will take me, before the village submits to the jungle. Then I return, poking and sifting.
Later that morning, before we set off on our compulsory hike to the waterfall, a small delegation of elders approaches Lucho, our guide. They have witnessed my short tour with some alarm. And they have a question for the intermediary. ‘Is the old man looking for gold?’
Something out of Something Else
The jungle began in London, a set of unstable particulars less secure every time I set foot outside my door. I read so intensely around my project that reading became the project. I unscrolled duplicitous maps. Teasing fragments showed no sign of cohering. This Peruvian expedition had been an unspoken obligation most of my working life. It was now a necessity, perhaps an endgame. I spent hours arranging recovered family photographs against group portraits of killer bands of Ashaninka posed against the walls of the Coffee Colony with their antiquated weapons. Uncensored glares burnt a challenge through fading museum reproductions. Angela Carter, commenting on my fetish for postcard divination, called up ‘the profane spirit of surrealism’. She knew that cards, laid out in a preordained grid, must tell a story. And that torrents of desperate words would have to be expended to complete it. ‘At once they become scrutable’, she wrote. ‘They are images of imperialism.’
The warriors were right to be fearful, as I was, of this form of psychic contact. And capture. They were not defeated by military opportunism or the choking tentacles of capital. They were leeched of life force by cameras, by the self-serving reports of adventurers and priests, by the double game of Seventh-day Adventists promising treasure harvests on the day of final judgement. With the Victorian passion for books of adventure, summoning young men of spirit to the farthest reaches of Empire, came library shelves of coffee histories aimed at seducing neophyte planters. The map in my head, soon to be translated into real-world geography, was as much a fiction as one of those territorial advertisements drawn by some unscrupulous Franciscan missionary, hot for preferment, and escape from the barren back country of Andalucía. Pr
My daughter Farne lent me a thick, ring-bound bundle of papers: Campa Cosmology: The World of a Forest Tribe in South America by the anthropologist Gerald Weiss. ‘There is no such occurrence,’ Weiss wrote, ‘as a creation of something out of nothing, but only a transformation of something out of something else.’
In my cycle of haunted London dreams of a jungle village I might never reach, it was hard to separate the shaman with the drum, the tampóro, from the circling, swaying, rhythm-intoxicated dancers moving around the fire. Or emerging, so it seemed, right out of the flames. I couldn’t see through the curtain of smoke. I was dreaming the same dream my father and grandfather had dreamed, after they died. The place where our founding ancestor waited with a sick king for balsa rafts to be constructed, so that he could take to the river.
They knew that song, the children, old men and even the monkey-trickster with the skin-tight skeleton suit. But when a very ancient, wrinkled, parchment-skinned grandmother introduced, softly, in a throat whisper, a new song, they picked it up at once. And they laughed when she plucked a dark leather pouch from the neck of her cushma and squeezed a drop or two of tobacco syrup onto to her lizardly tongue: before feigning instant intoxication, heart-seizure, and falling, poleaxed, to the ground. She was playing it and experiencing it with the same relish. And the other dancers tumbled with her, still laughing.
Scorched earth and ashes are raked into a black carpet, sliced and rolled like a freshly laid English lawn. And a rigid body, my own, eyes wide open, is laid in the yawning gash. The living ground, untouched by human hand, covers itself again, leaving no trace of the swallowed sacrifice. The swaying dancers, still drumming, melt away into the forest and the night.
That was my recurrent dream before I left Hackney. Resinous quinilla woodsmoke formed an active column, straight up through the windless night, before wrapping itself around the platform of the sentinel tower on which I had hidden, in order to witness the secret ceremony of my own internment. The necklaced shaman listened to the protests of the crackling wood as the flames licked and devoured.
‘The Hollow Ones,’ he pronounced, ‘will be roasted like white-lipped peccaries and returned, as food for our fellow men, in the reaches of the jungle where paths fail.’
Hungry flames converted the report from the American Museum of Natural History into ash, which would, soon after dawn, be swept up, black-bagged and dumped in the river. William Faulkner talks about how ghosts always travel half a mile ahead of their own shape. My jungle dream was like that. An unreliable preview. Travel before travel. Understanding before experience. Experience before evidence. Random thefts from the library of the lost as prospectus for a journey outlined in some Book of the Dead.
The cosmology of the Campa, according to Weiss, and according to the blackened page I read in my dream, predicted and preordained my ancestor-stalking trip to Peru in the summer of 2019. A journey that would require the nudge of an impatient and better-informed daughter.
Heartsick for his lost grandfather, Kíri decides to go downriver… A group of his relatives pursue him, intent upon killing him… They attempt to shoot him with their arrows, but only shoot each other… Kíri then advises the survivors to kill him by driving a spike down through his head and body into the ground.
I had another book, written by my Scottish great-grandfather, and published in 1895, as my source and inspiration. Arthur Sinclair travelled downriver on a balsa raft. In some way yet to be defined, I believed that Arthur was out there, in the territory, a hungry ghost unconcerned with ‘closure’. Too many words, too many journeys on trains and planes, left me sick and used up. It felt as if the world I knew was about to go into quarantine. Shivering, sweating, sneezing, before this crisis arrived, I reached for the nearest Faulkner and treated myself to torrential language-clots from Yoknapatawpha County. But there was no escape from the suck of river sand and the jungle village. I had hardly begun Absalom, Absalom! when I found this sentence: ‘And anyone could have looked once at his face and known that he would have chosen the river and even the certainty of the hemp rope, to undertaking what he undertook even if he had known that he would find gold buried and waiting for him in the very land which he had bought.’
The land my unquiet great-grandfather purchased through the act of describing it, and the months of his diminishing life he donated to this adventure with its tumultuous consequences, called me out. Before I could start where he finished, and write my way back to him, I would need to uncover some part of who and what he once was.
Dirty Sand
Lucho Hurtado, a short powerful man of the mountains, moved swiftly and easily between worlds. He possessed all the implements required to confront potential difficulties of the trail. Patting the numerous pockets of his rough fisherman’s waistcoat, he was reassured of his readiness to follow the Amazon from ‘its farthest origins to the final encounter with the Atlantic Ocean’. He offered elite travellers the opportunity to ‘meet locals from the cloud forest and low jungle, and to feel the way of living of the people in different ecosystems’. Lucho made Huancayo, a railway terminal, his base: a busy, dizzy, traffic-fretted, horn-blasting dust sprawl where altitude-sick travellers could earth their hammering migraines and find a tourist-appropriate hotel where they could set up an authentic round of pisco sours while the floor trembled beneath them. He would never knowingly undersell his pitch, but Lucho had solid investment in backpacker hostels and an upstairs restaurant specialising in pizza and scorched chicken variants.
After a few long days on the road, our eyes shut on blind bends and detours around landslips, Lucho brought us to his finca, which was titled from abbreviations of the names of all his children. A composite word that looked as if it had been constructed to represent something impossible in the Quechua language. The children now lived with their mother in another country on the far side of the Pacific. The small farm was somewhere to take stock, to dip in a green pool that might yet become a fish speculation, and to prepare for our descent, on foot, to the river.
The stories came, after dark, at the long table where we took our communal dinner. We had brought, against advice, a bottle of native Peruvian wine, and it did not disappoint. It was every bit as wretched, perfumed like cheap hair oil, as Lucho had warned. But there were assorted herbal beers on offer and, for the reckless among us, a mouth-numbing hit from the moonshiner’s carboy with the metal tap. This festering trench water had a few inches of bloody scum on the surface. And it was just possible to see something as thick as my wrist floating, or moving, through it. A decapitated snake. The medicinal potion took months to ferment, dripping slowly now into china mugs, where faint pomegranate patterns had been brutally dissolved by the acid of previous infusions.
The kitchen was a gracious room with crossbeams like a native hut, but high-roofed in recycled corrugated materials and dressed with stained-glass windows rescued from failed investments, demolished hotels, bars, bordellos. The finca was a history of reconsidered projects, nothing wasted. A huge, nailpaint-loud red American fridge was freestanding in the middle of the floor, like a resprayed version of Kubrick’s monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. A pop art trophy scavenged from some Cola-supplied counter-insurgency base in El Salvador. The fridge was not connected and now served as a store cupboard for preserving important documents from the depredations of ants. It was surrounded by bunches of green bananas, freshly cut that morning by visitors trusted with lethal machetes. Sliced razor-thin and quickfried in deep fat, the plantains would provide a crunchy base for our fish dinner.
