During the day, the Yaguas live in open-sided houses with palm-frond roofs and a platform that raises them from the humidity of the soil, but, at nightfall, the plague of mosquitoes is stronger than their stoical hides and the evil-smelling oil they smear on their bodies, and they have to seek refuge in huts made of palm fronds, which they close hermetically with a door made of the same material. As long as it is dark, all the members of the tribe remain in their refuge. The promiscuity in which the night is spent does not bother them because the moral codes that govern us mean nothing in their tribal world. I approached the door of a hut, and a stench of strange oils and sweaty bodies immediately repelled me.
The life of these people is reduced to meekly following the orders that nature imparts by means of the rain.
In the winter, they eat yucca and the potatoes they have harvested in the summer, and they go out in their dugout canoes to fish among the thickets of the jungle. It is fascinating to watch them. They have a vigilant immobility that nothing disturbs, small harpoons poised in their right hands. The dark water obscures everything, until suddenly there is a quick movement, and the harpoon is plunged into the deep. The water is agitated for a moment, and then you can see only the tiny buoy at the end of the harpoon, tied to the rod by one or two meters of line. Powerful strokes of the paddle keep the canoe close to the float until the fish becomes too exhausted to struggle.
They also hunt, when the season is favorable. Sometimes they use an old shotgun obtained through who knows what strange transaction to bring down a large animal, but in general, they prefer to use silent blow-pipes. When bands of monkeys pass through the foliage, a small arrow whose point is smeared with curare wounds one of the monkeys. Without even a cry, the monkey extracts the arrow and continues on its way for a few meters until the poison takes effect and it falls from the trees—alive, but unable to emit a sound. As long as the noisy troop of monkeys is passing, the blow-pipes are used constantly, and the hunters note the points in the foliage where the wounded animals have fallen. When the last monkey has departed the scene of the tragedy, the hunters retrieve all the wounded animals and take their contribution of food back to the community.
Celebrating the arrival of their white visitors, they presented us with one of the monkeys they had killed. We prepared the animal on an improvised spit in the way it is done on our Argentine pampas and tried its meat, which was tough and bitter but had an agreeable, wild taste. The Indians were enthusiastic about our method of preparing the dish.
To reciprocate, we gave them two bottles of a soft drink we had brought with us. The Indians drank the contents excitedly and saved the caps with religious fervor in the pouches of woven fibers that they wear around their necks, which is where they keep their most prized possessions: an amulet, some shotgun cartridges, a seed necklace, a Peruvian sol, etc.
On our return, somewhat anxious about the approaching night, one of them led us along shortcuts that enabled us to reach the safe refuge of the metal roofs of the colony before night fell. We said goodbye with a handshake, in the European style, and the guide gave me a present of one of the fibers from his skirt, the only clothing worn by the Yaguas.
The dangers and tragedies of the wild have often been exaggerated, but we had an experience that shows how valid the warnings are. People always say that it’s dangerous to wander away from the path when you’re in the jungle, and that is certainly true. One day, while relatively close to our base, we suddenly looked at each other in consternation because the path we had hoped to return by seemed to have vanished. We carefully retraced our steps, but it was all in vain.
While one of us stood in a fixed spot, another walked straight ahead and then returned, guided by shouts. We did this in every direction without success. Fortunately, we had been told what to do in case we found ourselves in such a situation. We looked for a special kind of tree, whose roots form partitions a few centimeters thick, which sometimes rise to heights of several meters from the earth and seem to give extra support to the tree.
With an ordinary stick, we began to strike those partitions as hard as we could. This produced a deep sound which, although not very loud, could be heard at a great distance and is much more effective than shooting off a firearm, for the foliage deadens the sound of shots. After a while, an Indian with a mocking smile appeared with his shotgun and, with signals, led us to the path and showed us the direction we should take. Somehow, we had strayed off course about 500 meters from the path.
It is generally imagined that the jungle is a lush paradise full of food, but that is not true. A knowledgeable local will never die of hunger, but, if others carelessly get lost in the forest, they will have serious problems finding food to eat. None of the kinds of tropical fruits that we know grow spontaneously there. To sustain oneself on wild plants, you have to resort to certain roots and palm fruits that only an experienced person can differentiate from others that look the same but are poisonous. Hunting is extremely difficult for someone who can’t identify a broken twig as the trail of a boar or deer, who does not know the watering places and who does not know how to move through the jungle without making a sound. Fishing in a place where the density of aquatic animals is so great is still a very complex art, since the possibility of a fish biting the hook is remote, and it is far from easy to harpoon them. But, when the soil is cultivated, what enormous pineapples, papayas and bananas! A little work is rewarded with tremendous results.
And yet the spirit of the jungle seems to overpower its inhabitants and merge them with itself. Nobody works, unless it is necessary in order to eat. Like the monkeys that seek their daily sustenance in the branches without thinking about tomorrow, or the wild cats that kill only to satisfy their hunger, the colony works only enough to keep themselves from starving.
The days sped by, filled with scientific work, excursions and hunting. The night before we were to leave, two canoes filled with leprosy patients drew close to the pier in the healthy part of the colony to express their affection for us. Their leonine faces in the torchlight were an impressive spectacle in the Amazonian night. A blind singer sang some huaynitos and marineras, while the motley orchestra did wonders to accompany him. One of the patients gave a farewell speech to thank us; his simple words conveyed a deep emotion that enhanced the impact of the night. For those simple souls, the mere fact that we had come to visit them, even out of curiosity, made us deserving of their gratitude. The serenade and farewell ended with embarrassing grimaces as they attempted to express their affection without shaking hands because the health laws categorically forbid physical contact between the patients and the healthy. The music and the farewell cemented our commitment to them.
The small raft on which we continued our river journey was crammed with gifts of food from both the members of the colony and from the sick, who competed in giving us the most food, the sweetest papaya and the fattest chicken. Then a little push toward the middle of the river, and we were talking to the river alone.
The song of the jungle
and the pain that is there
come over the river
on the rafts that arrive.
The hardened boatmen
come drowning their sorrow
over the bloody routes
of the spiraling river.
We drifted down the river for two days, waiting for the moment when we would see Leticia, the Colombian city we wanted to reach, but there was a serious drawback—we couldn’t steer the hulk. Everything was fine as long as we were in the middle of the river, but whenever we tried to draw close to the bank, we had a furious battle with the current—which always emerged victorious, keeping us in the middle until, at a whim, we were allowed to reach whichever shore the river chose for us.
On the night of the third day, we finally saw the lights of the town—but the raft continued on its way unperturbed, in spite of every effort we made. Whenever it seemed as if we were about to win, the logs of the raft would make a pirouette and head once more toward t
he middle of the current.
We struggled until we could no longer see the lights upstream and were about to take refuge under the mosquito net, abandoning the guard duty we did occasionally, when the last chicken—the tasty dinner we were longing for—took fright and fell into the water. The current carried it a little faster than it carried us. I stripped off my clothes and was about to jump in after it—one or two strokes would take me to it, and then all I’d have to do would be to wait for the raft to catch up—but I hesitated. I don’t really know why; it may have been the enigmatic river or the subconscious thought of an alligator. But, in any case, the chicken sailed on down the river, while I, raging inwardly, kept promising myself that I would jump in and then holding off again, until I gave up. Frankly, the nocturnal river scared me; I was a coward in the face of nature. Later, both of us were extremely hypocritical, consoling each other about the poor chicken’s terrible fate.
When we woke up, we were aground on the Brazilian side, many paddling hours from Leticia. But we did manage to get back there, thanks to the proverbial kindness of the people living along the gigantic river.
When we flew out in the Colombian Armed Forces Catalina, we looked down on the immense jungle. From above, it seemed like an enormous green cauliflower barely broken by the brown thread of a narrow river, extending for thousands of kilometers and hours of flying time. We saw that our months-long intimate friendship had been with only an infinitesimal part of the gigantic Amazonian continent, and this realization had us lowering our heads in reverence.
Far below, the spirit of Canaima, God of the Jungle, emerging from the foliage and floating on the rivers, raised his hand in a gesture of farewell.
Machu-Picchu: Enigma in Stone of the Americas
This article, “Machu-Picchu, un enigma de piedra en América,” was published in the Panamanian weekly supplement to Siete, December 12, 1953. It draws on Che’s visits to Machu-Picchu during both his 1952 and 1953 journeys through Latin America. Not knowing if he would ever have the opportunity to return to the ancient Inca city, he commented: “It is one of the most marvelous sights I can imagine.”
Crowning a hill of steep and rugged slopes, 2,800 meters above sea level and 400 above the fast-flowing Urubamba River that bathes three sides of this peak, is the ancient city in stone that, by extension, has been given the name of the place that is its bastion: Machu-Picchu.
Is this its original name? No. In Quechua, Machu-Picchu means “Old Mountain,” as opposed to Huayna-Picchu, the rocky needle rising just a few meters from the settlement, which means “Young Mountain.” They are simply physical descriptions of the topographical features of the place. What would its real name be then? Let us diverge for a moment and travel back to the past.
The 16th century of our age was a tragic time for the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The bearded invader flooded the continent and the great indigenous empires were reduced to rubble. In the center of South America, the internecine struggle for power between the two candidates to inherit the crown of the deceased Huayna-Capac, Atahualpa and Huascar made the business of destroying the greatest empire of the continent even easier.
In order to contain the human mass approaching perilously close to Cuzco, one of Huascar’s nephews, the youthful Manco II, was placed on the throne by Spain. This maneuver had an unexpected consequence: although the indigenous people now had a visible head, bestowed with all the formalities of Inca law still possible under the Spanish yoke, the monarch was not as easy to control as the Spaniards wished. He disappeared one night with his leading chiefs, bearing with him the great disc of gold, symbol of the sun, and from that day onward, there was no peace in the old capital of the empire.
There was no security; moving from one place to another was not safe. Armed bands used the ancient, impressive and now-destroyed Sacsahuamán as their base, the fortress guarding Cuzco. They roamed the territory and even moved in on the city.
It was 1536.
This large-scale revolt failed, the siege of Cuzco had to be abandoned, and another major battle at Ollantaitambo, the walled city on the banks of the Urubamba River, was lost by the troops of the indigenous monarch. The threat of the guerrilla war, which had been a considerable thorn in the side of Spanish might, was definitively reduced. One day, in a drunken outburst, one of the conquistador soldiers, a deserter who had been brought to the indigenous court along with six of his companions, killed the Inca sovereign. He and his unfortunate compatriots were put to a horrible death by the indigenous subjects, who displayed their severed heads on their spears as both punishment and challenge. The sovereign’s three sons, Sairy Túpac, Tito Cusi and Túpac Amaru, reigned consecutively and died while in power. With the third, however, something more than a monarch passed into death: it was the final demise of the Inca empire.
The forceful and inflexible viceroy, Francisco Toledo, took this last sovereign as his prisoner and had him executed in Cuzco’s parade ground in 1572. The Inca king, whose life—secluded in the temple of the sun virgins, with a brief parenthesis as sovereign—ended so tragically, addressed his people in his final hour. His potent speech roused them from their former torpor and meant that his name would be taken up again by the precursor of the independence of the Americas: José Gabriel Condorcanqui, Túpac Amaru II.
The danger to the representatives of the Spanish crown had been extinguished and nobody thought to seek out the old operational base of the Incas, the well-concealed city of Vilcapampa, whose last sovereign had left before being taken prisoner. Thus began a period of three centuries in which total silence reigned over the city. When an Italian man of science, Antonio Raimondi, devoted 19 years of his life to traveling all over the country in the second half of the 19th century, Peru was a land still largely untouched by the European. Although it is true Raimondi was not a professional archaeologist, his profound erudition and scientific skills gave an enormous impetus to the study of the country’s Inca past. Generations of Peruvian students now turned their eyes to the heart of a country they did not know, guided by the monumental work El Perú, while scientists from all over the world once again recovered their enthusiasm for investigating the history of a once great people.
At the beginning of the 20th century, a US historian, Professor Bingham, who had come to Peru to study the route taken by [Simón] Bolívar, was captivated by the extraordinary beauty of the regions he visited and intrigued by the provocative questions raised by Inca culture. Professor Bingham, satisfying both the historian and the adventurer within him, set out in search of the lost city, the operational base of the insurgent monarchs.
Bingham knew, from the chronicles of Father Calancha and others, that the Incas had a political and military capital they named Vitcos, and a more distant sanctuary called Vilcapampa, the city where no white person had ever set foot. Armed with this information, he set out on his search.
Anyone with even a superficial knowledge of the region will not be unaware of the magnitude of the task he had set himself. In mountainous terrain, covered with dense, subtropical forest, crisscrossed by rivers that were more like highly dangerous torrents, not knowing the psychology or even the language of its inhabitants, Bingham set off with three powerful weapons: an indomitable zest for adventure, keen intuition and a healthy fistful of dollars.
Patiently, paying a price in gold for each secret or piece of information he could extract, he penetrated the heartland of the extinct civilization. One day in 1911, after years of arduous labor, routinely following an Indian who was selling an unusual set of stones, Bingham, unaccompanied by any other white man, found himself marveling alone at the impressive ruins that, surrounded and almost submerged in undergrowth, were there to welcome him.
There is a sad side to this story. The undergrowth was cleared from the ruins, which were then studied and perfectly described... and totally stripped of whatever objects that were uncovered. Researchers triumphantly bore off to their country more than 200 crates of archaeological treasures that w
ere both invaluable and, let us be clear about this, worth a great deal of money. Bingham is, objectively speaking, not specifically guilty of this and neither are the citizens of North America guilty in general. Nor can anyone blame a government without the resources to support an expedition on a scale comparable to that of the discovery of Machu-Picchu. Is no one guilty then? Let us just accept the fact that the answer to the question of where one might study or admire the treasures of the indigenous city is obvious: in the museums of North America.
Machu-Picchu was not just any old discovery for Bingham. It was the triumphant crowning of an overgrown child’s limpid dreams— like the dreams of almost every amateur in this area of science. A long series of triumphs and failures culminated there, and the city of gray stone encompassed all his fantasies and his visions, propelling him into comparison and conjecture that was at times far removed from careful and empirical demonstration. The years of exploration and those that followed his success made an erudite archaeologist of the formerly itinerant historian; many of his assertions, backed by the formidable experience acquired in his travels, were taken as gospel truth in scientific circles.
In Bingham’s view, Machu-Picchu was the ancient abode of the Quechua people and the center from which they expanded before founding Cuzco. He delved into Inca mythology and identified three windows of a ruined temple as those from which the Ayllus brothers, characters in Inca mythology, had emerged. He found conclusive similarities between a circular tower in the newly revealed city and Cuzco’s sun temple. He identified skeletons that had been found in the ruins, almost all of them female, as being those of the sun virgins. Finally, after carefully analyzing all the possibilities, he came to the following conclusion: The city he had discovered had been named Vilcapampa more than three centuries earlier. This, he said, had been the sanctuary of the rebel monarchs, and had previously served as a refuge for the vanquished followers of the Inca leader Pachacuti (whose body lay in the city) from the time of their defeat by Chincha troops until the resurgence of the empire. But the reason this city had in both cases been the refuge of vanquished warriors was because this was Tampu-Toco, sacred place and initial nucleus, located here and not at Pacaru-Tampu, near Cuzco, as Indian notables told the historian Sarmiento de Gamboa, who interrogated them on the orders of Viceroy Toledo.