The gold machine, p.2
The Gold Machine, page 2
Lucho’s village ‘boy’, reversed baseball cap and matching labial-pink T-shirt, took the ritual launch of the yarning session as his cue to climb on his motorbike and head home, to partner and first child. The young man had heard it all before, but Lucho was disappointed to lose him. He liked to see his drivers and field workers join us at the table.
The first of the session’s tales concerned a tourist party he was about to lead over sections of the Inca Trail. Before they set out, a group of riverside Ashaninka, with whom he had previously dealings, came to Lucho’s house in Huancayo, to demand a particular favour. They knew that, from time to time, he undertook diplomatic and railway business in Lima. Would he carry a sample they had procured, on their own land, for analysis? They were convinced that river sediment contained traces of gold.
He could not refuse, but Lucho was appalled. If the analysis was positive, he knew that speculators would move in. Sections of the forest would be felled, the ground chewed up, and the river clogged with spoil. But he had been entrusted with this burdensome task, it was an obligation if he wanted to sustain his mutually beneficial relationship with the Ashaninka.
The tourist troop were staying, before they headed off to the mountains, in a palm-fringed border town hotel, a place owned by the brother-in-law of the police captain and used for entertaining visiting dignitaries and minor tax officials. Trivial but annoying difficulties – rooms unprepared, detritus of all-night parties floating in the swimming pool – were sorted out by a few sharp words. Lucho’s driver was on time and occupied giving his fly-suicide windscreen a wipe, while the walkers, Germans and South Africans with experience in the bush, loaded their kit. They were ready for any hazard and welcomed the thought of it. That is what they were paying for, dollars preferred.
But that scoop of native earth carrying the expectations of the tribe, the task laid on Lucho… where was it? Disaster. He had left the bottled sample at his bedside in the hotel. He was forced to abandon the excursionists. They were all competent, they could make camp, find water, start a fire, and wait for his return.
Lucho demanded the key to his old room. He turned the place over. Nothing. No trace. He stormed the desk: who was responsible for cleaning? Send the miscreant up at once.
A nervous boy appears, denies everything. Lucho opens his travelling bag and shows the empty slot where the sample should have been. He also shows, quite by accident, he affirms, a large Bowie knife with a serrated, bone-carving blade. The boy backs off, trembling. He runs from the room. And out of the hotel.
The police, associates of the hotel manager, arrive. Lucho’s interrogation is lengthy and physically persistent. He is left in the cells to consider his fate. But the sample, the potential golden harvest, is never found. Eventually, papers sorted, he is released. And, looking on the bright side now, he does not have to bear the guilt of being, in some measure, responsible for the ruinous exploitation of the land.
The Silence in the Forest
My great-grandfather, guided – in his view – by a pair of duplicitous and drunken priests, was stumbling and slithering down the old Ashaninka salt route, now a future trade highway, towards an encounter with the indigenous chief who would give the command for the construction of balsa rafts to carry the invaders along the Rio Perené to impassable and unmapped rapids. The commissioned surveyors, former planters from Ceylon, were done, ready to lie down where they stood, cocked weapons resting across their laps. As is so often the way of these things, they had, at their lowest ebb, stumbled on a great secret. It was hidden in plain sight a short distance from the settlements of Metraro and Mariscal Cáceres, linked villages that would, in a few years, come to be dominated by Seventh-day Adventists, offering schools, chapels and medical centres. Charitable developments covertly sanctioned by the Peruvian Corporation of London, the insatiable predators who would establish the great coffee estates on which these villagers were obliged to labour. Giving up their old gods for golden promises.
But the road was a villainous rut at a gradient of about one in three, a width of about eighteen inches, and knee deep in something like liquid glue, Arthur Sinclair wrote in his published account of the 1891 expedition. Before we had gone five miles one-half the cavalcade had come to grief, and it was some weeks ere we saw our pack mules again; indeed, I believe some of them lie there still. We soon found out that the padres knew as little about the path as we did ourselves, and the upshot was we were benighted. Shortly after six o’clock we were overtaken in inky darkness, yet we plodded on, bespattered with mud, tired, bitten, and blistered by various insects. Whole boxes of matches were burned in enabling us to scramble over logs or avoid the deepest swamps. At last there was a slight opening in the forest, and the ruins of an old thatched shed were discovered, with one end of a broken beam still resting upon an upright post, sufficient to shelter us from the heavy dews. It turned out to be the tomb of some old Inca chief whose bones have lain there for over 350 years, and there, on the damp earth, we lay down beside them, just as we were. Our dinner consisted of a few sardines, which we ate, I shall not say greedily, for I felt tired and sulky, keeping a suspicious eye upon the Jesuit priests.
The trail guides, Franciscan not Jesuit, were not deceiving this trio of white adventurers, hiding behind beards, dispatched by the Peruvian Corporation with a contract to survey and affirm. Sinclair’s party was being processed down an ancient and haunted desire line, from the Mountain of Salt to the living, surging, serpentine river, by way of the burial place of a godlike warrior, a splinter of origin: an emanation of Father Sun. The missionary priests were initiating these pale outsiders, nudging them forward with hints and selective misinformation, through the maze of psychic energies intricately woven to protect this place and to keep it free from the curse of visionary capitalism. 1891 was a fateful year, with three major expeditions – military, engineering and commercial – hellbent on pioneering routes for exploitation of this savage and enduringly lovely Eden. The wilderness garden from which the unrighteous had been expelled. And forever excluded.
The salty residue of the sardine feast was a feeble sacrament to offer to the sodden ground on which they struggled to sleep.
We were told, by the way, that the bones we were handling were the bones of Atahualpa, so treacherously murdered by Pizarro.
A fantastic fable the priests concoct to entrap the credulous colonists with their moleskin journals and Kodak cameras. But in lisping such lies and alternative histories, the unholy fathers were also demonstrating respect for tactics employed by Indians under interrogation: agree reluctantly, after sharing food and exchanging gifts, to tell strangers whatever they want to know. Then contradict yourself, offer multiple versions. And deny all knowledge of the original conversation when you meet on another day.
Atahualpa, the ‘last Inca Emperor’, was strangled with the infamous garrotte on 26 July 1533, before his clothes, and the strips torn from his skin, were burned. A merciful amendment to the original verdict: barbecuing at the stake. This sinister ritual was enacted many miles from Metraro. It was said that the Inca offered to fill a large room with gold, in order to ransom his life. After the mock trial, more of a preordained ceremony than a considered evaluation of guilt and innocence, an attendant friar, Vincente de Valverde, pressed his breviary into the affronted hands of the condemned man. Atahualpa was then baptised into the Catholic faith and marked with the name Francisco – in honour of his conqueror, the Spanish illiterate suckled by sows, the butcher of worlds: Francisco Pizarro.
Gold, more spirit than substance, was pure intoxication. So fill the wooden holds of creaking cargo fleets. Stack the mass of bloody plunder in the expectant watchtowers of Seville. Cast another heretic saint for another gilded cathedral. Bless the armies of the damned.
Túpac Amaru, hereditary Inca rebel, was beheaded in Cuzco’s Plaza de Armas, forty years after the death of Atahualpa. A persistent Andean myth claimed that the buried head would soon reconstitute itself, grow another body and initiate a golden age, a second and more powerful Inca empire.
Arthur Sinclair, a Scot who was not so easily deceived, soon discovered that the place where he had slept was dedicated to a different Atahualpa, the charismatic Juan Santos, a highlander who adopted the title of the last Inca emperor when he led a very effective revolt against the Spaniards in the 1740s.
I arrived in Mariscal Cáceres with my daughter Farne and the filmmaker Grant Gee on 9 July 2019. We were determined, if it were at all possible, to persuade one of the villagers to guide us to the burial place of Juan Santos Atahualpa. The point of connection with my great-grandfather’s published narrative.
The Ashaninka we had already interviewed offered so many contradictory versions of the same tale: the shrine or hole or cavern belonged with the legends of childhood. A song of the grandmothers. With truths it was forbidden to reveal. With the land. Their land. Juan Santos Atahualpa had emerged from some obscure generative source like a black nuclear sun; a light so brilliant that eyes hidden behind shielding hands could peel away the skin gloves protecting the brittle bones of their fingers. The great chief, the undead and unsleeping commander, was said by some to be a spectre of whiteness: Juan Santos had travelled in foreign lands far across the ocean. And walked home across the obedient waves. Before he was betrayed, buried, divided, dispersed – and resurrected as a whispered myth, the gift-delivering, sun-crowned albino Messiah of the Adventists.
We were bouncing and shuddering up the mountain road that had evolved from the original 1891 incursions of military engineers. My great-grandfather was not impressed.
I have in other countries travelled in tracks traced and made by elephants, and had reason to admire their gradients and marvel at the topographical knowledge displayed, but anything so perfectly idiotic as this atrocious trail I had never before been doomed to follow so far. It was a relief to leave it and cut our own way through the jungle.
A few miles out of Santa Ana, where rainy season landslides had turned the river to a ditch of red, mud-coloured rocks, we had to cede a little of our headlong velocity to avoid jolting over a ragged man sleeping in the middle of the road like a performance art traffic-calming device. He was known. He would stagger to his feet in a few hours and make his unsteady way back to the nearest hamlet, where he would find a little food and drink, enough to sustain him for another day. He was part of the intricate clockwork of the territory.
The road had as many twists and eddies as the river. As soon as we started to climb, the cruel gradient committed itself to preparing us for Mariscal Cáceres. Tumbledown shacks made from scavenged planks owed their survival to the capitalised electoral slogans painted on their sides: (EL NEGRO) VENEGAS, EXPERIENCA y CAPACIDAD. There were graphic illustrations, like Jim Dine or Roy Lichtenstein, of a thick yellow pencil against a red background. The suggestion is: please make your mark on the ballot paper. Put your X right here. Get the representation you deserve. There is a wider world beyond the road, beyond the river. Beyond the coffee plantations.
Around a hairpin bend, beyond the point where an old woman had a stall serving some locally fermented drink, was a big blue sign with a schematic picture of a stooped pedestrian, propped up by a pilgrim’s staff. He appeared to be skipping across a torrent. CAVERNA JUAN SANTOS ATAHUALPA 11.6 km. And another skeletal silhouette of a man at the mouth of a cave: CAVERNA METRARO 9.9 km. The implication being that the cave of Juan Santos Atahualpa is 1.7 km beyond the village we are approaching. But when we return, at the end of the day, the blue sign has vanished.
The old lady we left behind in the smoky twilight of the village settlement beside the Rio Perené told us, as we blinked and rubbed our eyes, that the cave – she had never been there – was once filled with weapons used in the rising against the colonists. In time, the Spaniards found and stole them. Now, dusty-mouthed and shaken, when we arrive at Mariscal Cáceres, Bertha, our former interviewee, is there ahead of us, helping to prepare the fish. She says that the body of Juan Santos was laid to rest in the cave on a bed of gold. Gold recovered from the Spaniards. And gold, when it is heaped up, multiplies. Breeds of its own volition. Juan Santos guarded it. The cave and the legend.
One of the village elders said that the shrine was just a few hundred yards from where we were sitting and talking. It would take us ten minutes to walk there. No more. When we had shared food.
After the meal, several hours in the preparation, was done and the exchanges made, the chief came to see us, a tame green parrot perched on his finger. The parrot whispered something in his patron’s ear. The chief said that he would lead us to the cave. But it was surely too far to walk before light failed, so we would have to ride in our car and follow our guides on their motorbike.
The official biker was a slight, stringy man, with a cultivated bandit beard. And a baseball cap with a green leaf and an italicised slogan: dope. It was too easy to typecast this Netflix character as a trafficker, a coca mule who knew the best paths between the Salt Mountain and the Gran Pajonál. But the village chief, sitting behind the biker, was in charge. Neither man wore a helmet. They took us for a mazy hallucinogenic ride, twenty minutes, forty minutes, past plantations of blackened bananas, over treacle tracks fast reverting to streams. Without warning, they stopped. And beckoned us to follow.
The man in the dope cap used his machete to cut a bamboo walking pole for Farne. The path through the jungle was steep. We imagined the sound of a distant torrent. The chief, in his flip-flops, was moving fast. We gripped the insecure curtain of vines under the dripping rock. The cliff crumbled as we rubbed against it, trying to stay on the provisional track. When our guide was gone, we hooked ourselves to saplings, right where we were; catching our breath, but scarcely breathing, as the biker explained how the chief needed to confirm that the path to the cave of Juan Santos Atahualpa was clear and navigable. ‘It’s not so very far, twenty minutes more.’
Thickening sugars of excitement, not fear, are absorbed into the green luxuriance of the enveloping trees. Sap informs our sweat. Our feet itch to form roots and drink from the reddish soil. If we can no longer hear the sound of the chief pushing the branches aside, there is no reason to expect his return. This is a commonplace of the novice in the jungle. ‘It is not the presence of unfriendly natives that wears one down,’ Michael Taussig wrote in Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (A Study in Terror and Healing). ‘It is the presence of their absence, their presence in their absence.’ Place, when breath is swallowed and held, forgives the distinction between myth and documented witness. ‘People buried in an underground of time in the lowland jungles are endowed with magical force to flower into the present,’ Taussig claimed.
All forward momentum, towards the cave and the teasing prospect of gold, is stalled. Warm saturated air flows through us. We steady ourselves against the curtain of slippery vegetation. Martin MacInnes, in Infinite Ground, a novel of disappearance and diminishing volition, catches the peculiar and disabling inertia that comes with being in the right place but the wrong story. ‘For the moment he didn’t seem specifically located, just general in the sounds of the birds calling, water dropping, twigs breaking and the branches falling.’
It was a process of folding into the baffle of the silence. We were made aware – father, daughter, great-grandfather, on our quite distinct journeys – of a shared identity. And of the mute presence of the biker, the man in the dope cap, our trickster familiar. And his special relationship with the low jungle and the path; how he was permitted to pass through, only so long as he stayed on sanctioned routes, stayed within his agreed role. But now he was separated from the chief, the man who had bounded so swiftly beyond sight and sound. There was only the smothering foliage and a projected sympathy between trees, birds, stones, streams and intruders. The leathery fronds of the giant ferns were slatted blinds filtering a seductive distillation of sunlight – before, on the stroke of six o’clock, it withdraws completely. We were no longer waiting for anything or anybody. There was no conversation.
‘He was the deep sounds in the forest that had no explanation, the shadow at the edge of one’s vision,’ Joe Jackson wrote in The Thief at the End of the World. He is describing the fever dream of a renegade English plant-hunter and rubber pirate, Henry Wickham. Broken in health, attended by vultures perched on the end of his cot, the planter waited patiently for the end. He was nursed by neighbours who knew that he was doomed because he whispered that he had seen the curupira, ‘the little pale man of the forest’. An acknowledged harbinger of doom. ‘The souls of those who died at the hands of the curupira wandered forever in the forest. Survivors left part of themselves beneath the canopy and were never the same.’
What had my great-grandfather, processed by two drunken priests down this same track, left behind? What would we leave, beyond some lame attempt to describe the magic of the forest suspension in which we found ourselves? Time is annulled. I thought, in an involuntary fugue of remembering, of trying to report, with accuracy, a golden November morning in Victoria Park. In London. The home that is fading so fast. A rising sun was dissolving the mist over the lake and working a natural miracle too ordinary to record. That place and this place, the then and the now. My identity lost somewhere between the two. The profligate autumn harvest of London plane, lime, copper beech, cherry and chestnut.
There was a man on the long avenue of the people’s park, gripping a pilgrim’s stave in his right hand, elegant in a long black coat, like a jaded but inappropriately predatory architect in a French film. He was walking steadily backwards. As if to confound his own mortality and win back a few precious hours. I watched his confident progress. What would happen, I wondered, when he reached the railings? He swerved slightly, made an adjustment, and passed on, before dropping out of sight. He could have been a world-tramping sadhu. Or a regular Hackney dude proud in his calculated eccentricity. The famous backwards walker. As posted on all good social networks dedicated to trivia.
