The gold machine, p.18
The Gold Machine, page 18
As always, the hotel receptionist was disbelieving of our demand for three separate rooms. But we required our own space in which the various activities – image-rendering, downloading, podcasting, and book scouring – could immediately commence.
Heroically, pale as death, Farne descends with me to the bar, at the end of a wobbly corridor dressed with strobing reproductions from Van Gogh: night cafés in Arles, screaming yellow houses, liverish portraits, and cobbled psychedelic streets where faceless pedestrians are beginning to slide out of the frame. With Lucho’s advice, I managed to avoid the effects of altitude sickness, only to arrive at a hotel experiencing waves of earth tremors. Bottles and glasses did not rattle behind the bar and other customers carried on their ordinary conversations, while I knuckled the edge of my chair and felt the floor shuddering beneath me. Where was the earthquake? And why were they ignoring it? It took both hands to get the coffee cup to my mouth. And then our misplaced guide burst in, ordering us not to apologise for the train’s early arrival. ‘Good, good. Great. Let’s get this thing moving. We start again new, a blank page.’
Farne is fading fast, as Lucho, a confident man with long silver mane and strong mountain face, launches his monologue: his life and ventures, calamities brought on by fate. And the vital experiences he has lined up for us, starting tomorrow. Early. Animal markets. Archaeological ruins. Hill climbs. Convents. He barely has time to accept a coffee. I notice the English family from the train hovering, books in hand, at the entrance to the bar, then backing rapidly away.
With Lucho’s hotel tape of anecdotes, delivered like parables, providing the backing track for the long climb upstairs, hanging on to the banisters, I had the sudden urge to confirm how much of his monologue was factual and how much was legend. I picked on our guide’s reference to his appearance in that film from BBC Manchester, Great Railway Journeys of the World, broadcast in 1980. The particular episode, ‘Three Miles High’, was presented by the Punch humorist Miles Kington, a dapper Anglo-Scottish traveller, from a cadet branch of the landed gentry. Kington is detached by class and education, but amused and alert, properly kempt in unyielding lightweight suit, a quiet grey with considered tie. The look, improved at altitude, by boulevardier’s casual scarf. In fact, Kington is the Oxbridge epitome of kempt.
The only thing I knew about South America, when I arrived in Peru, was to be on the lookout for revolutions.
When the train from Lima halted in Huancayo, so Lucho said, he was on the platform. And in the film. A talking cameo.
I knocked on Grant’s door. He should be able to call up this phantom from the past on YouTube or some such. The documentarist was scanning hours of raw footage from the great railway journey of our own. I think he was pleased with what he’d got. And happier still to be inside, in a room that only shivered, but did not shake. He took a break, and obligingly tapped up the material I requested.
The sun is going down, and so are we, through a valley of maize and eucalyptus trees.
Grant’s digital footage, dancers, drinkers, clown, on one screen, was mute. With attractive golden hour, sun-splintered film, offering a more romantic rendering of the same stretch of track, on the laptop.
HUANCAYO: close-up of the station sign. Indigenous people jumping down to the platform from a train with a regular timetable, servicing the community. Along with Kington and supporting crew.
And here, at once, is the young Lucho Hurtado. This was a train that he needed to meet, this was his moment. He accosts the suave and uncreased journalist. He wears a thick plaid shirt and a flat black cap. He is competitively touting for one of the twelve ‘almost good’ Huancayo hotels. He does not smile or ingratiate himself. He pushes through the natives, not looking up directly at Kington. Or at the camera. He makes his pitch. He suggests a visit to the office. Kington patronises, with effortless charm, clearly tired after the daylong mountain ride. But Lucho is not done: he sweeps in again, offering to reserve a seat on the bus. And is rebuffed.
I get Grant to run this brief incident over and over. The empire-building insouciance of the Anglo-Scot who will be moving on, next morning, with more exotic lands to conquer and describe. And the unblinking Aztec gravitas of the Huancayo man, for whom pitching and touting and parading facts is a serious vocation. Lucho is both the man who was not there when we needed him and the man, in the past, who goes on, and on, making his rejected hotel pitch. Here already was the drama we would have to conjugate, in order to complete our journey. Without blood, sweat and tears.
Convento de Santa Rosa de Ocopa
‘Peer into the darkness, shivering, and shivering drink the darkness up.’
– Martin Thom, CLOUD, a coffee cantata
From the innocent cropping of high pasture, largely undisturbed, to a swift and stunned transit, still nibbling anxiously on green strings of good roughage, stiff and upright in the back of a truck, or lying down, bondaged, in boot of family car, to public inspection and swift sure blade, to naked post-mortem exposure on a metal grille through which thick blood runs free, shaggy pelt separated from the purest, whitest flesh, to clover-spiced barbecue smoke: mountain sheep are brought to market. Corydale and Merino. Beautiful animals inured to their fate. The stone and dust acreage of organised chaos at Chupaca is the first location on Lucho’s adventure tour agenda: animal market, mountain ruins, farmhouse lunch, convent. ‘Come on, let’s go, vamos.’ Today Peru must face Uruguay, in a tactical battle against perceived aerial threat, in order to go through to the semi-finals of the Copa América. Will it be possible to follow the match as we drive?
Although I’m concerned about leaving her alone at the hotel, I’m quite relieved that Farne is not with us. The unavoidable reality of so many doomed beasts – llamas, piebald hogs, horses, mules, net sacks crammed with piglets – offered, exchanged, traded, admired and slaughtered, gathered up in one place by farmers with high-sided trucks and improvised stalls, would not be the most effective antidote to a skull-splitting soroche hangover.
Nobody appeared at the breakfast table. Grant was working on downloading, on re-establishing family connections and sampling online Guardian traffic from the world we have left behind. Farne, when I knocked on her door, was sick. Pale. Barely able to stagger across the room. And clearly in no state to appreciate Lucho’s crash course in the excesses of local colour. I arranged for some breakfast to be sent up. And told our impatient cicerone, who, this time, arrived on the button, rubbing his hands and pacing, that we would have to be back by three o’clock at the latest. And that the Franciscan Convent of the Missionaries at Ocopa was the one site we really had to visit. The Convent was an essential part of our story, holding maps and documentation relevant to Padre Gabriel Sala, the man who guided my great-grandfather to the banks of the Perené.
‘Of course, yes. Come on, let’s go.’
A battered car and a young Huancayo driver are waiting. Lucho meets and greets a man he says he was at school with, the owner of this and several other hotels, and away we go, foot to the deck, through tight streets packed with morning drifters, on the horn.
‘So what was the biggest danger of the trip?’ Anna asked, when she met us at Heathrow, on our return.
‘The driving,’ we replied, in unison.
Today is the Festival of San Pedro. The Seventh-day Adventist Fernando Stahl abhorred these festivals, which he saw as the devil’s work. Priest-inspired orgies of drunken licence. Cocaine indulgence by highlanders led astray in the worship of their saints and idols. Blasphemous rites ruining health and the capacity to deliver an honest day’s labour. Debauchery with dirty shirts.
Under low white clouds, the place of meeting and exchange for small farmers is crowded with men and animals. It is unhurried and lacking that shrill edge common to the old markets of London’s East End. The farmers are inky haired, short and strong, many favouring jeans and baseball caps. The women, with their traditional layers of skirt over tight leggings, their woollen cardigans, and striped helmets, take care of business, while the men stand in groups, talking quietly, or checking their phones. It feels as if the highlanders have been deputed to take their animals on a saint’s day outing, an excursion, during which they will be given the best seats in the car.
And, yes, the lambs are silent. Under a blue ceiling. In the company of the still breathing dead. Their brothers and sisters.
The market sky is always the same. Always truer than any representation of it. The particular quality of blue, picked up from the tailgates of trucks marking the edge of the permitted zone, and the denser blue of distant hills, is fed into the eyes of men and animals. Condemned creatures experience none of that bowel-loosening panic, the ripple of herd hysteria, of enclosed sheds: the mechanised hygienic slaughter of industrial farming. Chupaca beasts are saintly in acceptance. Llamas wait patiently in their family group: two brown ones, grounded, are rubbing their long necks against the standing white dominant, who turns to stare, unblinking, at Grant’s camera of fate. This is a much healthier exchange than the shame of a city zoo, where we process so awkwardly in celebration of our separateness from the imprisoned species.
Where squealing piglets are just food in a bag, makeweights, mature pigs are solitary and phlegmatic, tethered by the rear hoof or slumped, legs retracted, black pillows of flesh on the sharp-stoned ground. The mules stand apart. They must find new masters, new burdens. But they will not be eaten. Except by bats and other natural predators. Unless they die on the trail. Unsold sheep come together to establish a temporary flock.
Although this colourful detour, arranged by Lucho, was never part of my premeditated vision of the Peru quest, something biblical in the relationship between men and animals took possession of me. Months later, under viral lockdown, our younger daughter, Maddie, kept us in touch with the grandchildren we couldn’t visit by sending nightly film reports to Anna’s phone. One of these, beyond sentiment, stopped my heart. The latest grandchild, Sami, the one born when Maddie and her troop were living with us for a few months, had begun to walk. The family are staying on a farm. The interested infant totters towards a pen of sheep. They bleat. He backs off, alarmed. Then, perhaps encouraged by his mother, he turns the corner of the L-shaped fence. And suddenly everything is new. He comes with confidence to the sheep, once more, but from another angle. They are silent. He baas. They respond. He baas again. It works.
But what affects me, now, is not the charm of this cameo and the brave revision of the child. The little scene, and the knowledge of who is filming it, in living colour, takes me back to a monochrome episode that I barely remember, and only as a witnessed film. The first home movie. I am the same age as Sami, more securely wrapped, tottering with the same footsteps towards the same animals, rough-pelted mountain invaders of a golf course. As caught on 16mm by my father. In watching, several times, the performance by our youngest grandchild, I was carried back to the emotion and excitement of my initial confrontation with these strange animals. I felt the heaviness of the ground, the tough spears of grass, the smoke in the wind. This was and is a present tense. And not what I had previously ‘known’, if at all, as a bleached fragment of archival film. Now lost. And probably beyond repair.
The fiesta spills around and over the slaughter field. Bands in matching funeral suits and dark glasses, with uniform red ties, tootle on their brazen horns. They have been hired at a substantial fee from another town. The procession resurrects, or exorcises, the devious spectres of colonialism. There are capering slaves and slave drivers with cracking whips. There are blackface leather masks with fleecy white beards attached, stick-on wool eyebrows and big straw hats. There are pranksters. There are twins. They dart among the crowd, to tease or challenge or rob. At the head of the troop is a conquistador, landowner, coffee plantation boss: a white man in sheep mask. He wears black pantaloons decorated with flowers and martyred saints. The celebrants halt at the church. This, we are told, is a propitious day for weddings. For carrying banners and Catholic effigies, released from their niches, to voyage in draped boats. The holy ones of the missionary monks are followed through the streets by mountain people in their finest clothes.
Lucho chivvies us away from the open ground with the animals. Tributaries around the market are reminiscent of Brick Lane in the 1970s: once you move from the established pitches, most of the action is on the floor. In the dirt. Unpoliced. Our guide inspects a fat and glistening hog, limbless, its head intact. There are stacked pyramids of guinea pigs on offer, varnished and flattened snacks. To be licked like salty toffee apples, before the bones crunch. Grant is drawn to the Andean women selling plastic bags of coca leaves, along with the alkaline substances required to extract the essence, when leaves are balled in your cheek. Coca chewing is an acquired skill. The supplementary aids can be ash of quinoa or burnt limestone.
My great-grandfather, impressed by the endurance of the men carrying his luggage over ground where he fought for breath, saw the economic potential of a coca-leaf economy. He experimented and made a favourable report, but the moguls of the Peruvian Corporation of London stuck with another addictive product, coffee.
Coca… is a plant not unlike the Chinese tea, though scarcely so sturdy in habit, growing to a height of from four to five feet, with bright green leaves and white blossoms, followed by reddish berries. The leaves are plucked when well matured, dried in the sun, and simply packed in bundles for use or export… Of the sustaining power of coca there can be no possible doubt; the Chunchos seem not only to exist, but to thrive, upon this stimulant, often travelling for days with very little, if anything else, to sustain them. Unquestionably it is much superior and less liable to abuse than the tobacco, betel, or opium of other nations. The Chuncho is never seen without his wallet containing a stock of dried leaves, a pot of prepared lime, or the ashes of the quinoa plant, and he makes a halt about once an hour to replenish his capacious mouth. The flavour is bitter and somewhat nauseating at first, but the taste is soon acquired, and, if not exactly palatable, the benefit under fatiguing journeys is very palpable. Cold tea is nowhere, and the best of wines worthless in comparison with this pure unfermented heaven-sent reviver.
Anticipating the potential struggle, in our present disorientated and short-breathed condition, on the steep climb Lucho promised, before a required inspection of the ruins of Pre-Columbian storage buildings, Grant made enquiries about the purchase of a stash of coca leaves. Our impatient guide stepped in and took control, joshing with the vendors, clinching the sale, and whipping the leaves into his own pouch. Along with a couple of spare guinea pigs, beaten as thin as vampire bats or roadkill under an articulated lorry. We never saw the leaves again.
——
This is a fortunate country of neat fields and working farms, thriving outside the politics of the larger co-operatives and the sprawling Spanish estates. We climb, a little stiffly, from the car. And on, at Lucho’s instruction, to a yellow-dusted hill of sharp unyielding stones. We must investigate the Huari remains of Arwaturo. But the most pressing task is to invent a foolish question, every twenty yards or so, in order to give us time to find some breath. Lucho demonstrated the best recovery position. ‘Bend forward at ninety degrees, hold the breath, hold it, now slowly release and up again.’
With the inherited experience of his highland childhood, his powerful build, mature curve of belly, long silver hair, Lucho reminded me of Carlos Castaneda’s Yaqui Indian mentor. And of the illustrations of this teasing shaman on the cover of those paperbacks that passed around in the Sixties, promoting the cult of cactus-gobbling initiation. Castaneda borrowed assiduously from the best sources and crafted a fiction of himself as a seeker mired in persistent idiocy. The anthropologist had a preternatural gift for saying the wrong thing and accepting all the humiliations heaped upon him. Lucho, I recognised, as I struggled up the track in his footsteps, was the don Juan of adventure tourism; a prescriptive brujo of the Inca Trail, the cloud forest, and the medicinal plants along the ridge on the summit of this hill. If any weed deserved a brief lecture, then it was worthy of our notice. If not, our instructor brushed it aside. Picking up a granite shard, Lucho demonstrated its cutting edge by slashing into the species of prickly pear cactus that offers a spurt of royal red cochineal. He explained that this natural dye is a useful product of female insects.
The colcas, or storage vaults, constructed from walls of fitted stone, command a notable view across the fertile valley. There are no other visitors. The ruins are guarded by a pack of feral dogs and a muttering madman. Lucho knows this person of old and is eager to avoid further entanglements. And a solicited toll. He says that he despairs of the habits of tourists, the ordinary ones who have not signed up for his instruction. Snorting, he takes himself off to gather up Inca Cola cans and blue plastic bags. Meanwhile, Grant squats on his haunches to stare long and hard at landscape he is not quite ready to film.
For a few minutes I had the ruins to myself. As at Lindisfarne Priory, so many years ago, I became conscious of a figure staying ahead, sliding behind the next wall, and disappearing into a cool stone chamber where I would find nothing but dust, before my eyes adjusted to historic darkness. Something lived between this reservoir of shadows and the harsh late-morning sunlight. A spectre I thought I recognised: my fellow speculator in virtual translation and cosmic conspiracy, the Advocate from Brussels. Cowled in wind-deflecting anorak, and gesturing emphatically in animated discussion with that other phantom of these ancient ruins, the sanctioned beggar, the Advocate was ahead of us once again. Or such was my oxygen-deprived hallucination. It seemed to be the task of this summoned entity, the international diplomat, to balance Lucho’s pragmatism with a wilder poetic of place. Disbelieving, I closed in on the barking chaos, rattling a few pesos in my hand. The madman of the ruins, holding back his dogs, snatched at them. But the other one, who reminded me so much of the Advocate, was away down the easier steps to the car park. Steps for which a purchased ticket was required to make an ascent. The retreat was free. Lucho was waiting with his blue bag of collected refuse.
