The gold machine, p.16
The Gold Machine, page 16
During my stay in Lima a question arose and was earnestly discussed with reference to the identity of the mummy preserved in the vaults of the cathedral, whether it really was the mortal remains of Pizarro, or whether it had been surreptitiously bartered by some sacrilegious thief. One theory was that during the War of Independence the royalists secretly carried off the treasured remains to Spain and left a mummy of similar bulk in its place, and this story was favoured by Americans whom I met in Lima… The matter now assumed great importance, and a committee of anthropologists was appointed to critically examine the mummy and report to the ecclesiastical and municipal authorities…
It was on the 26th June, 1891, the 350th anniversary of Pizarro’s violent and bloody death, that the coffin was opened amidst the almost breathless but intense anxiety of the populace… On removing the lid the body was found almost in its entirety and completely mummified, still partially covered by rags of silk… and the remains of a finely embroidered linen shirt. The body was quite desiccated, and of a dingy white colour. On close examination it was found that certain portions were amissing, viz., the fingers, toes, and certain other parts, having been cut off and removed. From the appearance, the committee were satisfied that these mutilations had taken place immediately after death… These atrocities had probably been committed by an exasperated populace on the corpse as it lay where it fell, atrocities which can scarcely surprise us when we look back upon the life of cruelty, avarice, treachery, and rapine, which had thus been summarily closed…
The report of the committee of anthropologists was published with commendable promptitude on Saturday, 27th June, 1891, and occupied four columns in El Comercio newspaper of that date. The conclusion come to was that the identity of the body was absolutely established, not only by general indications, but by evidence of wounds on the neck and elsewhere, which, after lying three and a half centuries, the mummified corpse clearly disclosed. The conformation of the cranium has a very marked resemblance to that of the typical criminal of to-day. The lower jaw protrudes abnormally, a certain sign of a brutal man. The chief peculiarity, however, is the knee joints, which are so unusually large as to look like a deformity. The total length of the mummy is fully six feet.
After having been carefully scrutinised, the precious relic was handed over to the care of the Metropolitan Chapter, who placed it in the Chapel of the Kings in the Cathedral of Lima, where the curious may now see all that is mortal of Pizarro resting on a couch of crimson velvet, the whole being enclosed in a marble tomb with glass sides.
Which was where we now stood, hoping to glimpse the lunar reflection of Arthur’s bearded and beaming face in the shine of the damaged cranium. This was not the skull disinterred in 1891 but another, dug from a box in a musty crypt in 1977. I said nothing, but I held to the irrational belief that, from the casting of these pathetic bones, the measuring of distances and angles, a ‘direction of travel’ would surely declare itself, to set us on the right path.
Allen Ginsberg, a young man in dedicated pursuit of his muse, and the answer to the riddle of the absolute, came here in 1960: seven years before I met him in London. And seven years before his fame had become a snare and an encumbrance, with nuisances like myself dogging his footsteps for interviews, for oracular pronouncements he was in no state to deliver. But deliver them he did. The Beat poet was weary of describing his auditory William Blake visitation in Harlem, the one that confirmed his lifelong task, his vocation, but describe it he must, bringing something fresh each time. He said nothing whatsoever about the equally significant revelations, under ayahuasca, in the Peruvian jungle.
The poet checked into the Mercado Mayorista, on this square, and then struck out to find a Chinese restaurant, where he enjoyed ‘a good bite’ of badly fried shrimps. ‘I must look crazy to the waiters,’ he wrote in his travel journal. ‘Strange wildhair debonair selfassured prophet – in Chink restaurant of the World-Night… scribbling the final definition of God.’
I investigated these blatant coincidences of cultural tourism only after my return to England. But the deep voice of Ginsberg, its rhythms and beard-stroking reflexes familiar from many hours at an editing console, trying to synch speech to movement of lips, was easier to track than the written words of my great-grandfather. The posthumous Arthur existed as a set of fading photographs, unreliable maps, and the stories left behind to provoke this future journey. Like all the other visitors to Plaza Mayor, Ginsberg commented on ‘dry bones, mummies, shells, & empty thankless skulls with holes for eyes and empty space where a brain once palpitated and thought and schemed more Cathedrals.’ He was astonished by the reality of these things: ‘once they were real as me.’ In the confusing network of streets beyond Plaza Mayor, the ‘Indians’ experience death every day and ‘take cancer for breakfast’. They understand, better than any of the intruders, that they are fated. The tourist poet, like Kerouac before him, a master of cultural appropriation, is determined to share and exploit that achieved condition they gloss as ‘lostness’.
With a single day in Lima, it felt right to stick as close to Arthur’s narrative as was possible, and to read the country in the way that he always did, by taking himself off to the nearest botanical gardens. It appeared from our very basic map that we could walk from Plaza Mayor to the Jardín Botánico by way of ‘Chinatown’. Spanish colonial cities of the conquest give proper attention to watering early, to tending plants with affectionate care, to enclosing and guarding their shady oasis gardens. Here was relief from the heat: sites of leisured conversation, private thoughts and illicit assignations. The degree of civilisation in any nation could be measured, Arthur reckoned, by the quality of its botanical gardens. And the state of its zoos.
One of the first objects of attraction to me is always the botanical gardens, but an enquiry for these elicited only a shrug of the shoulders from a Limeno, and at length a confession that the gardens were not what they once were, in fact, that they were abandoned. The Chilians, alas! had been there, tethered their horses amidst the choicest flower beds, cut down the noblest trees for firewood, and carried away the rarest shrubs to Valparaiso. Not content with this the vandals also appropriated the statues and seats, stole the lions, shot the elephant, and, sad to say, these terrible Chilians walked away with several hundred of the fairest Limenas, the flowers of many a decent family…
Altogether the Chilians, notwithstanding the fact that they took a few souvenirs of their visit, behaved tolerably well during the time they were in possession of Lima. Ask any shopkeeper, and he points to plate glass mirrors with several bullet holes; nevertheless he says, ‘I wish they were back again! Trade was never better than then, and what the Chilian bought he paid for, which is more than I can say of my own countrymen.’
The more we channelled the ‘lostness’ of the Beats, the faster we walked, and the more the unknown streets became a culturally diverse replay of the most picturesque parts of Hackney and Whitechapel, with added vim: piping musicians, handcarts carrying away the remains of markets, narrow shops, bead curtains, bar counters, deals being cooked, cash-money pocketed, accounts settled. Stinks of fish, fruit and flesh. Human and animal shit congealed and steaming. Impossible bundles effortlessly shouldered. Sacks dumped.
Progress slows as we weave and swerve and drudge onwards, unconvinced that Arthur’s botanical gardens can still be located in this quarter. Until, at last, flagging badly, we are reassured by the tease of scrofulous palm trees reaching over a spiked fence. The surrounding adobe walls are crumbling into red-brown dust. The main gates are closed and patrolled by a uniformed female custodian who is under strict instruction to let nobody into the grounds without full accreditation. We persist, telling Arthur’s story, producing the book with his portrait, to no effect. ‘Impossible.’ Out of the question without written and stamped permission from the director. This is now an institute for serious research and experimentation.
Even in post-war neglect, Arthur found inspiration in the gardens. He compiled a lengthy list of ‘rare and valuable’ plants. Grubby, footsore, chafing with our various burdens, we claimed to have travelled from Europe specifically to pay our respects to these gardens. We could not afford to fail. We were as urgent as Klaus Kinski, in filthy white suit, coming off the Amazon in Fitzcarraldo, and demanding to be given access to the opera house. He has to be let in, otherwise the film will fold. Herzog’s metaphors and conceits will collapse. But fail we did, falling at the first hurdle. We were left, poking our cameras through the decorative ironwork, trying to carry away some documentary record of what appeared, superficially, to be dull and neglected ground.
Back at the hotel, there was a package for Farne from Lucho, welcoming her to Peru and supplying a promotional map for our railway trip, next morning, over the Cordillera. There was also, more alarmingly, a letter for me. I don’t know how he found out where we were staying, but the Advocate had his sources. The further he was from our expedition, in a strictly geographical sense, the more pressing the intimations of our self-appointed spiritual mentor.
‘The modern virus of elegant parasitism penetrates Peru through the open door of its Europeanized capital,’ his letter, diplomatically franked in Guadalajara, began.
It is surely more than 18 months that I have the feeling of living in a slow-motion disaster. First Lehman, then Greece, then Charlie-Hébdo, Greece again, Paris again, Brussels, now Albion. I have been travelling, as you are at this time, and I can tell you: Lima is over. The bankers have returned to their burrows and the bureaucrats carry papers and suitcases. I am right now in Mexico. But the IMF meeting I am forced to attend looks more like a shirt manufacturers’ convention: everybody knows what the other is going to say and there is no appetite for alternative garments. I spent 11 hours in Buenos Aires of which 180 minutes was in a taxi. There was a troubling sense of making a return, but, in truth, there was no return but a seamless delivery into a parallel district of Brussels.
On the Lima–Mexico flight I sat next to a woman who happens to be an honorary consul in Sonora. I mentioned Lowry, but his name did not ring a bell. I was happy to have a few hours to return to English poetry of the years before Thatcher. And this is why I am writing to catch you now, before you strike off for the interior. Do you remember a book you published back in 1973, in an edition of a few hundred copies?
With the letter, as if in confirmation of the Advocate’s notion of a brief return to a site of unfinished mourning as the involuntary translation into a ‘parallel’ topography, he enclosed a photograph of what I took to be the notorious Palais de Justice in Brussels, while still under construction. It was nothing of the sort. I don’t know how I had missed it on our tour. Under the admitted influence of Joseph Poelaert, who played Albert Speer to the grand follies of Leopold II, a Peruvian architect of Polish descent, Bruno Paprowsky, was commissioned to create a prestigious courthouse for the Avenida Paseo de la República in Lima: a diminished duplicate of the Brussels Palais, lacking only the magnitude of the original dome, that swollen boil. The Peruvian Supreme Court, conscious of this loss of status, put in an immediate request to the Belgian authorities, to provide plans from which a suitable dome could be concluded.
I had to wait until I was back in Hackney to follow up on the Advocate’s other hint or warning. In a rarely visited chapbook of poetry from 1973, I found these lines: ‘LIMA was one message. Maps drawn, graves robbed, collapse on the Andes.’ I guess that Arthur’s story must have obsessed me for the length of Farne’s life, nagging away until she decided to bring this journey to fruition.
Among the preliminaries for the silver-stamped and blue-covered book, I was caught by the photograph of a young baby, being cradled by me, in my scruffy jacket and period moustache, somewhere in woodland. This was Farne. The Peruvian quest started in that moment. In Epping Forest or Welsh duneland. She’s asleep and I’m watching a shot I have set up being taken by my wife.
Soroche
‘My own experience… was fainting and violent vomiting. There is no real preventative, and no two may suffer alike. Travellers are usually warned in Lima to beware of taking alcohol: its effects are often fatal during suffering from soroche; and in the face of such warning I hesitate to give my own experience, which was that a moderate use of stimulants was decidedly palliative.’
– Arthur Sinclair, In Tropical Lands
I was diligent about the breathing exercises that Lucho prescribed as the most effective and cheapest antidote to the inevitable mountain sickness (or soroche) we would face on the second-highest train ride in the world. Our guide, who was due to meet us at the station in Huancayo, had a briskly pedagogic tone in his communications. His way or suffer the consequences. Farne took on the instructions that suited her and ignored the rest. We had our own quests, to be defined in the undertaking of them, while Lucho, drawing on years of experience in ‘finding out how all these different people lived, what their customs were and what crafts and products they created’, had a very firm preconception of the adventures his faithful band of elite tourists should undergo, in order to conform to his vision of the good life as good business. Good for all. Indigenous people, aliens and canny providers: an ecology of active awareness.
Take one deep breath, fill your lungs, hold it as long as you can, then let the breath slowly out. It was as crude as that. I sat on a bench in St Leonards-on-Sea, indulging in the play of light over the English Channel, before drawing in a decent capture of ozone, burger fizzle and sour seagull derision. Then I dragged myself up seven flights of steps in the concrete hulk shaped like a cruise liner. The medicine was repeated two or three times, every day I spent at the seaside.
The other trick was much easier, coca tea. Steady infusions of maté, either in teabag form, before first light in the hotel, or with brimming cups of floating green leaves later in the day. Arthur was certainly a fan: ‘One of the most precious plants of Peru. A bush about 3 feet high, the leaves of which seem to sustain the natives for days without any other food, enabling them to undergo fatigue.’
Lucho had advised that we should arrive at the station by six a.m., several hours before our train was due to depart. I perched with my tea on a weird, semi-circular, aquamarine sofa, like a Dalí pastiche, in which Mae West’s plump scarlet lips had been frozen and tightened into a heroin rictus. On the wall behind me were sculptures of bombed roses, their petals assembled from the detritus of a breakers’ yard. The supposedly energy-donating coca beverage had a narcoleptic effect, leaving me pleasantly detached from what lay ahead. And more in tune with the alternate-world versions proposed by my great-grandfather and Allen Ginsberg.
‘Alone in hotel across the street from Presidential palace,’ Ginsberg wrote in his journal. ‘Pizarro’s bones, I glimpsed in a glass coffin one block away, 500 years before me here.’
In subdued reverie, the American poet drifts out in search of something undefined, ‘a dark street full of beggars’. His feet hurt and he feels like a sickly spy, an outsider afraid to raise his eyes from the pavement. Those pavements, wide and inevitable, between the square with the Cathedral and the Presidential Palace, was where we walked, immediately after inspecting Pizarro’s bones. Farne felt that we should take the measure of the station, the Ferrocarril Central, before we turned up, next morning, to catch the train.
This was the former Estacion Desamparados. Ginsberg and Arthur Sinclair passed through, poet and planter, both surveyors, after their own fashion, of a dark future predicted by this proud temple to the new way, the railway built in part by Chinese labour. There was an imposing Egypto-classical facade, with baroque trimmings, like an Amazonian bank or opera house. But there was also, as we discovered before the sun rose next morning, a dead zone at the back; a dangerous, dog-stalked, dirt shack wasteland, where cab drivers would confess their bewilderment and punch haplessly at their sat-navs. Or where cars and trucks, head-to-toe, would make fidgety nocturnal exchanges.
Farne told us that this building – we passed, unchallenged, into a marbled entrance hall – had once been the headquarters and the office suites of the Peruvian Corporation of London. And that made perfect sense: managers, with their imported oversize desks and furniture, could look from their balconies, down the line, and glory in gleaming silver ladders of futurity running towards territory yet to be exploited. From the start the railway was politics. Would it service the industrial horror at La Oroya? Would it ship out refrigerated containers, the abundant but perishable fruits of the cloud forest? Or would, as was almost certainly going to be the case, the new railway yield to the power of the road interests, the unions and the controllers?
The Andean train now ran once-a-month excursions, Lima to Huancayo and back, as a tourist experience. The grand railway project, in which the Peruvian Corporation was involved, began in January 1870, with a labour force of 10,000, made up of Peruvian, Chilean and Chinese workers, living hard and breaking their way through the most resistant terrain.
Still absorbed with the Peruvian author’s Roger Casement fiction, I was interested to see that the gracious, light-filled, pillared spaces of the old ticket hall had been converted into a tribute exhibition for Mario Vargas Llosa, the failed presidential candidate who had spent many years living in London: Casa de la Literatura Peruana. Curated photographs and labelled relics of the novelist took their place alongside the bronze bust of Enrique (Henry) Meiggs, the railway’s American backer and impresario. And the employer of the visionary Polish engineer Ernest Malinowski (1818–1899). ‘Where a mule can walk, there I can lay my tracks,’ he boasted.
We wandered outside, to absorb the atmosphere of the deserted platform, its columns and flagstones, before taking a quick circuit of an exhibition of anarchist posters and defiantly smudged single-sheet publications. I decided that this was a good spot in which to hide the first of my photocopies of Arthur Sinclair’s smiling Aberdeen portrait. His pale grey ghost would track us as we tracked him across the territory. The bearded Scot seemed to fit very well with this documentation of sanctioned subversion.
