The gold machine, p.26
The Gold Machine, page 26
We wanted to go back over what had happened on our own journey. And to clarify aspects of what would lie ahead, if we succeeded in following the episodes outlined in Arthur’s account. We talked about the village of the Ashaninka called ‘King Chokery’, on the other side of the Perené. I mentioned that the King’s wives fed him on what was perceived, by Arthur, to be a great delicacy: white maggots. They restored him to health.
‘This is not for health!’ Lucho said. ‘We normally eat wasps and maggots. They are a staple, like rice. Good protein. There are different kinds of worms and other parasites that are good to eat. And there is always yucca. If the plantation is blessed with parasites, we call them old friends. We collect them, cook and eat them. No problem.’
For Lucho’s benefit, I read aloud from Arthur’s account of the benefits of chewing the coca leaf.
‘Yeah yeah yeah. He sees these people chewing, he wants to try. He has described it really well, how you must use limestone or ashes with quinoa. You activate the cocaine, mix it with gastric juices in the stomach. It gives a lot of energy. It is very good for old people, Alzheimer’s or other sickness. Not many people in the Andes go senile. They keep working. You remember the old Chinese woman in San Luis de Shuaro? She was totally there with her brain. She has everything because she’s a chewer. But chewing the leaves is a totally different situation from narco dealers and that stuff.’
It was Lucho’s belief that after the era of the European colonists, the Peruvian Republic did not make a good start, because they didn’t rescue the ‘lost knowledge’ of the indigenous people.
‘Just imagine! The medicine! The natives have so many plants. There is so much talk about ecology. You could get rid of plastic. There are wrappings from leaves in the jungle. But we didn’t learn properly. We went the wrong way. We want everything that is artificial. We are only returning to nature now that we have almost destroyed it.’
‘How did you come to the farm?’ Farne asked.
‘Well, my father was manager of certain lands, shared with other people. There were two hundred acres for each of them. The others made excuses, they were doctors. There was malaria, yellow fever. We are talking about the 1960s. My father’s friends knew that the Trans-Amazonia Highway was going to be completed. My father appointed a man called Manuel. He could speak good Spanish. He got the other natives to come around. He was basically the one who hooks people in. The natives made a deal with my father to clear the land, so that he could start a plantation. Those natives would come and go as they wanted, even to our house in Huancayo.
‘But there was an uprising, Guillermo Lobatón Milla. A branch of Che Guevara, what he was doing in Bolivia. They were putting trouble into the jungle. The person in charge was Lobatón. He was held in good respect by the natives. This was something the government did not like. So they put in a base for special police. Highly trained people to destroy the guerrillas. After my father had been arrested by them in the jungle, he went back to Huancayo and abandoned this piece of land, but he kept the natives working.
‘The other people involved with him were ready to give up. One had died, the doctor, and the other had sold his clinic and didn’t want to be part of the deal. He went to a senator in Lima, made some money. People who had invaded the land didn’t have any papers. A lawyer, who was somehow involved, said: “Pedro, I have a piece of land you can have, if you get me the money.” Don Pedro had the money. He came here with the lawyer. He fell in love with the place. It was almost the same as the estate he had before. This one didn’t have a road. But my father felt it in his guts. He decided to make the deal.
‘I never have trouble with the natives. I know the natives. I have the contacts. After two years clearing the ground, there was a deal with the lumber company. They wanted the wood and we wanted the farm. They put a road through, and continued on, because they were searching for the right wood. For twenty years, they exploited the area, trucks coming and going. The road was very, very bad. We travel on top of the wood trucks. Trucks loaded with logs, with chains around them. That was the only way to move around.
‘In the last years, don Pedro got into trouble. A bit of debt with the bank. The bank wanted to take the farm. My father fell for a bit of drinking. There was a moment of hyperinflation in the country. Dollars were up in the clouds. Money in Peru is worth nothing. The bank was going to take the farm. I was twenty-five, just married and trying to save. I had something like two hundred dollars. Two thousand dollars was huge money. I paid the bank, to get the farm free of debt. But the same bank that was charging my father went bankrupt. From that time, it was my right to be here on the farm. I was young. I started the restaurant in Huancayo. My father was happy, he stayed here. I came to the old house with travellers.
‘We didn’t have water in the house. We didn’t have electricity. But these were different kind of travellers. They go for showers to the waterfall. They use candles in the night. We get up very early for adventures. We climb the waterfall or go on trails through the jungle.
‘I decide that I want to be in charge at the farm. Don Pedro was a little bit better. My brothers and sisters were upset. They thought they had rights over the farm. I told them that to have rights you have to work. “Tell me, what have you planted?”
‘I have done a lot of planting. I have paid the debts. In Peru, laws say that each child is allowed a share, even if they are outside the marriage. My father, in 2000, could be giving part of the farm, when my mother was still alive, to another lady who was not the official wife. I told him that I needed to get a couple of papers done. It was a lucky moment, without that paper I didn’t have a thing. My brothers and sisters would want a piece. I don’t sell anything. I am a person who gets attached to things. You look around this kitchen, everything comes from somewhere else. Those windows belonged to the hostel I kept for backpackers. Other bits come from my hotels. This is my history. You tell me, how can I sell my history?
‘Nothing can happen until you understand the system here. I might have a bad idea, invite someone from the court, a judge. He likes the place, he can make me disappear. He pays bribes. He pays a girl down the road to accuse me of rape. The law offers no protection. My way of working with the local people is to be very open. I have learned a very simple rule: if you have enemies in your house, it is better to move out. I am working hard to sort all the papers, gather all the information, make things clear. I am going to make this an internationally protected legal area. We don’t want any problems with the natives. Now do you understand?’
Cerro de la Sal
‘The curse of facts and the blessing of illusions, the bitterness of our wisdom and the deceptive consolation of our folly.’
– Joseph Conrad
On the verandah, alongside the screaming red, phone-booth-sized Coca-Cola machine, and staring with trepidation at hills we had travelled so far to experience, we had some friendly debate around the question of salt as a motive for travel. With no keys as yet for our rooms, we stood in the frame of the open door and confronted the implications of this timeless view. Farne’s version, ‘mountain of salt’, carried the suggestion of its near homonym, fountain of salt: a magical outpouring from one particular point in the green forest, a gushing salt spring. And a secret known only to privileged guides and initiated chiefs. The location was a significant commercial and spiritual value. Controlling salt was controlling trade: the potatoes and woven products of the highlands, the weapons and bright trinkets of outsiders. For feathers and pottery paid in tribute to the local cacique. Salt was needed for the preservation of meat and fish. It was an essential ingredient for sustaining life itself.
There was a tradition of salt pilgrimage for the Ashaninka of the low jungle in the months of July, August and September. Before the rainy season. A toll was paid when permission was granted for crossing alien territory. But taxes imposed by the Spanish, and later by armed representatives of the Peruvian Corporation of London, were fiercely resisted. There were uprisings by groups of Campa from the eastern Andean foothills in the winter of 1897: farms and estates of English settlers were burnt, and colonisers massacred when they tried to demand goods or services in exchange for access to the salt quarry.
Our own guide, Lucho, the brujo of adventure tourism, had delivered us to the place where we needed to be, the start of the trail on which Arthur, led by Padre Sala, entered the rainforest. Lucho had chosen his room, before we arranged, in the fiercest heat of the day, to hike towards the source of the salt bounty. He announced, before disappearing into the house, that he would carry us, early next day, to our preordained encounter at the Ashaninka village, Pampa Michi.
‘Crossing the Paucartambo, about two miles from the Convent, we entered the dense forest, and struggled along a track almost impassable from its narrowness, deep mud, and absence in many parts of any sort of gradient,’ said Alexander Ross.
We were on what was left of that trail. My sensation, confirmed by the solid mirage of this hill, which reminded me, in its anvil shape, of Golden Cap in Dorset, was of a portal opening to provoke wilder speculations. I remembered those months, living with that quintessential English vision through the iced-over window of the farm bedroom where I scribbled in gloves, coat and woollen hat. I was fired with new theories about London and the hidden patterns of its architectural forms, churches, mounds and ‘prehistoric’ circles. And the ways in which we were persuaded to move between them.
In my verandah discussion with Farne, I used the term ‘salt mountain’, in the conviction that the entire massif, this impenetrably wooded and blunted pyramid, was all salt. Because I could feel, already, before we stepped one yard into the breath-stealing afternoon temperatures, a surge of physical transformation; blood calling to salt, salt to calcium, bone to water. Dizzying, disturbing, and seductive. But first we had to find the gardener, the solitary caretaker of this deserted hacienda, and without a word in common, persuade him to lead us to the fountain or seam or quarry of salt.
We were both right, it appears. Or that is what we understood, through signs and bits of phrases, as we set out. The hill was a salt sculpture, like a Highways Agency mound heaped against winter, for a road that had not yet been built. But it contained a specific wound, in a quarry near the summit. There was an exposed vein, where as many as five hundred labourers, using iron axes and sharpened stones, had hacked out blocks of salt to be carried in baskets down to the Paucartambo River. And on, by heavily loaded balsa rafts, to the jungle settlements. The rafts voyaged in flotillas of up to twenty vessels lashed together.
The Ashaninka, who permitted us to stay for a few nights in their village beside the Perené, existed, in topographical terms, ‘below the salt’. They were obliged to make annual pilgrimages that became ritual journeys keeping ancient traditions alive: rock salt tasted better and was more portable, in its convenient blocks, than brine salt. The derogatory English phrase came from a period when rock salt was beginning to be mined in Cheshire. Elaborate containers like those for holy relics were carefully positioned on tables. Only those of high rank had access to the precious condiment.
Before Lucho departed, in a whirlwind of dust, he told us that the gardener, the silent Armando, was the man to conduct us over the salt mountain. But it was early afternoon, siesta. We stepped outside the somnolent resthouse to explore the well-tended grounds. After several unrewarded circuits of the property, Armando manifests. He is inky haired, dressed in a green T-shirt that fades into the tonal range of the coarse grass, the palm fronds and the hill. The gardener lives and sleeps in inherited wellington boots. The honed machete is an extension of his arm. He is amused and alarmed when we ask to be taken on the salt road, bootless and without weapons. The madness of strangers! But if the hacienda is ever to attract visitors, he must accept such ludicrous challenges.
Effortlessly opening his stride, he is away. In the drumming tropical heat, we limp in his wake, losing heavy droplets of precious sticky salt with every step taken. The baked mud and the cutting stones of the uphill trail are visibly steaming. The cool jungle presses on both sides. We will have to break into a panting jog, if we are to catch the spectres of Arthur, Ross, Padre Sala and the mule train.
Without warning, but at a well-judged moment when we are about to be confirmed in our folly, and ready to scratch a path towards any pool of shade, Armando plunges away to the left. He says nothing, but we hear him hack and slash. Slithering, falling, hanging on to thorns and vines, attached and unattached, we follow. Through the densest, most clinging of thickets, through a thatch of spearing stalks, to a hidden salt pond: a frosted glaucoma eye in a festering swamp clearing. Much of the salt shines in conviction of its status: it cannot be chopped into neatly portable blocks and carried away in woven baskets. This salt pan is untraded ground. It is telling us that we are still on the right track. But not here, not now. Not ever.
Armando indicates again, by gesture and slow Spanish, that if we are serious about making this expedition, up the salt trail and beyond, we must acquire wellington boots and machetes. And some common language would be useful too. Meanwhile, this afternoon, we can find our own way home.
Red-brown mud queers the rim of the salt lake. There are channels, like fractal river systems seen from space, licked out by animals. Grant falls to his knees. He is mesmerised by the potential of the set to which he has been led. He sets up his tripod, but it is too late: he has forgotten how to shoot film. Pulsing salt crystals blow focus and eat exposure. Grant lies down in a swoon of obeisance. He has been pressured by the reading of him as a Conradian figure: as Kaspar Almayer at the end of that first novel, Almayer’s Folly. House burnt down by his own hand, the ruined colonial trader shares his final hutch with a Chinese squatter who fires up his opium pipe.
His back against the wall, his legs stretched stiffly out, his arms hanging by his side. His expressionless face, his eyes open wide with immobile pupils, and the rigidity of his pose, made him look like an immense man-doll broken and flung there out of the way.
The black-sprayed figure of the filmmaker, stretched at full length, chasing his elongated shadow across the dirty white creek, was also in thrall to an undeclared quest. Grant travelled with us as a fictional projection, while making his own fiction, drawing on whatever he found useful in our narrative. He was in active pursuit of something else entirely. And here, for the first time, since the tragic landscape of La Oroya, smoke snaking in a vertical column from the tall chimney, he had found it. And it him.
Farne was a presence in Grant’s film. She was interviewed under instruction that she should behave as if she were playing a role that might, or might not, be jettisoned when the edit was done. I was never glimpsed. Never heard. Left at home. Disqualified by age, sex, race, and previous meta-literary conceits, I was replaced by a veteran actor, marooned in a concrete cruise ship, in a Sussex seaside town under quarantine. He scrolled through old films, old albums, and the mustiest books. He was not permitted to speak.
If I had made the journey – and I was no longer sure of that – Almayer’s Folly would have been the book I chose to carry with me on the flight to Lima. It was published in the same year, 1895, as Arthur’s first hardback production, after a number of slim chapbooks and pamphlets of recycled journalism. Conrad started his composition in London, between voyages, in idleness. He carried the manuscript of the work-in-progress with him on his travels: to France, Poland, Belgium and the Congo. On a cruise of the Torrens, he pitched the project to Galsworthy. And again, as serving first mate, he tried it on W.H. Jacques, during the long voyage to Australia in 1892. The engine of the story is always a futile dream of gold. Did Conrad ever coincide, in maritime languor, with Arthur? The stiff-backed merchant seaman with the fine ear for the rhythms of speech – how a tale should be told and who was doing the telling – and the crusty Scottish planter, the bearded man who took such pride in shaping those remembered taffrail conversations between strangers. The anecdotes, the anathemas. The profits and loses of Calvinist fate.
Almayer’s thoughts were often busy with gold; gold he had failed to secure; gold the others had secured – dishonestly, of course – or gold he meant to secure yet, through his own honest exertions.
The haunted trader, painfully mismarried, housed in a decaying ruin with a daughter he does not understand, rarely thinks of his own father: ‘a subordinate official employed in the Botanical Gardens’. He thinks instead of gold, but not in terms of mines or buried coins, but as an agent of material and spiritual transformation. He broods on whatever lies on the far side of mere possession. He spends his allocated bounty of words. He drains the hoard.
Nina, the fictional daughter of the ‘real’ person, a Dutch Eurasian called William Charles Olmeijer, who was chosen to become Almayer, is not persuaded.
Expedition! Gold! What did she care for all that?
Harsh light strobed on the white pond. This was the best sequence Grant never shot. The camera was in position, but it was not activated. Salt was a spiteful reverie. And when the Conradian documentarist pulled himself upright and left the salt pond, to follow us back to the hacienda, his shadow stayed behind, imprinted.
With every last guilder in his possession, and in confident expectation of the ‘great changes’ sure to follow the establishment of the British Borneo Company on the island, Almayer builds his trading post. But he is deceived. His beloved daughter is flown, but not forgotten. He breaks into his locked and abandoned office, sets fire to his papers, and burns the house down. He takes to opium and dies. Goodbye. Done. Almayer departs for the better place with one final benediction: he has learned, with his dying breath, how to forget. But the scribe of his fate is not so kind: Conrad’s second novel, An Outcast of the Islands, winds the clock back, restoring his tragic victim to youth and folly. A life to be re-endured before it has happened.
