The Old Patagonian Express

  ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Africa.’ This is Hildy, who looks fresher, having sat down.

  Bert says, ‘We were the last people out of Uganda.’

  ‘It must have been terrible.’

  ‘Those poor Hindus. Took their earrings off at the airport.’

  Elvera says, ‘It was scary. I liked it.’

  ‘You saw mountains like this, and African women walking down them with things on their heads.’

  ‘Bert went fishing.’

  ‘In the Nile.’ As he says it, and smiles, the Peruvian river running beside the train, the funny little Anta River, looks homely: what is this to the Nile? ‘I caught huge things – Nile Perch they call them. The water was as black at that seat there.’

  Mr Upbraid says, ‘Look at the poverty.’

  This is the village beyond the town of Anta: some mud huts, some pigs, an alpaca with matted fur, small girls carrying infants, and children with their hands out crying, ‘Monis! Monis!’

  ‘Haiti,’ says Bert. ‘Ever been to Haiti? That’s poverty. That’s squalor. This is nothing. These people have farms – everyone has an acre or two. Grow their own food. Roof over their heads. They’re all right. But Haiti? They’re just starving there. Or Jamaica? Even worse.’

  No one can contradict him. We looked out of the window. Bert has made it seem all rather prosperous.

  Bert says, ‘That’s not poverty.’

  It is no good my telling him that these are tenant farms and that these people own nothing but the clothes on their backs. The huts leak. The plots of vegetables are high on the hillsides, some on Inca terraces, others like light green patches stitched against the cliffs at a sixty-degree angle. I am tempted to tell him this, that no one owns anything here, that these Indians themselves are owned. But information confuses these tourists: they like to guess at the meanings of things. ‘Looks like a kind of cave – I suppose they lived in places like that, years ago’ and ‘Sort of a stairway – must lead to a kind of look-out.’

  ‘It’s a sunny day, but it’s real dark here.’

  ‘That’s because we’re in the valley.’

  The conversation, pure Thornberry, went its rackety way as we slid past the rumps of these squatting mountains.

  ‘Look. More Indians.’

  There were two, in red pie-plate hats and shawls; one tugging a llama out of a field, the other – perhaps for the benefit of the tourists – ostentatiously making yarn from a spindle of rough wool and twisting the stuff in her fingers.

  ‘Did you get a picture of that, Bert?’ asked Elvera.

  ‘Just a minute.’

  Bert took out his camera and snapped a picture of the two Indians. A man named Fountain was watching him. Bert saw Mr Fountain and said, ‘That’s the new Canon – just on the market.’

  He did not say how much he paid for it, or stress that it was his. It was an oblique piece of bragging: That’s the new Canon.

  Mr Fountain took the camera, weighed it in his hand, looked through the viewfinder and said, ‘Handy.’

  ‘Compact,’ said Bert. ‘I wish I’d had one of these when we were on our Christmas trip.’

  There were a few murmurs, but not much real interest.

  Bert said, ‘Know what a Force Twelve gale is?’

  Ignorance often seems wrapped like a package. The murmurs were like the rustlings of the wrapper of that plain thing. No one knew.

  ‘It was a cruise,’ said Bert. ‘We’re one day out of Acapulco. Nice sunny day. Suddenly it clouds up. Pretty soon it’s a Force Twelve. Everyone was sick. Lasted forty-eight hours. Elvera went over to the bar and sat there – just held on for two days.’

  ‘It was my security blanket.’

  ‘Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. See, Dramamine only works if you take it before you start to puke. It was awful. I walked around for two days saying, “I just don’t believe it. I just don’t believe it. I Just don’t believe it.” ’

  There was more. For ten minutes, Bert and Elvera Howie told their hurricane story, and even in their monotonous narration –they took turns, interrupting each other to add details – it was a terrifying report, like a page of Arthur Gordon Pym. It was a story of high waves and wild winds, sickness and cowardice and loss of sleep. The old people on the ship (and this alarmed the old people on this train) were thrown around so badly they suffered broken arms and fractured legs. ‘And one old fellow – nice old guy – busted his hip. Some people were hurt so bad we didn’t see them for the rest of the trip.’ Bert said it was chaos; Elvera blamed the English captain: he hadn’t given them any warning – ‘He must have known something.’ Afterwards, the captain had said that in all his years at sea it was the worst storm he had ever known.

  Elvera had been glancing at me with a kind of sour mistrust. Finally, she said, ‘You English people.’

  ‘I’m not English, actually.’

  ‘Actually,’ she said, and made a face.

  Bert was still talking about the hurricane, the wind, the broken bones. The effect of his tale was to make this light rain falling into a canyon in the Andes seem a spring shower, and this railway journey no more than a joyride. Bert and Elvera had known days of storm in the Pacific; this train ride was a Sunday outing and almost beneath notice.

  ‘I want a drink,’ said Elvera. ‘Instead of telling these people about our other trip, why don’t you concentrate on this one and find me a drink?’

  ‘Funny thing,’ said Bert. ‘I don’t speak a word of Spanish. I don’t speak anything but English. But I can always make myself understood. Even in Nairobi. Even in Italy. Know how I do it? I sit there and say, “Me – want – a – drink.” It always does the trick.’

  He soon had a chance to prove that he could hurdle the language barrier. A conductor entered our car. Bert smiled and tapped him on the arm. He said, ‘Me – want – a – drink.’

  The conductor grunted and walked away.

  ‘That’s the first time I ever –’

  ‘Look.’

  Ahead, through a black gateway of pinnacles, was a wide flat valley filled with sunlight; birds were slanted in the sky and on ledges like the diacritical marks on vowels, and there were green streaks, wind-flattened bushes, on the steep mountains beyond. In the centre of the valley, coursing beside fuchsias and white orchids, was a turbulent brown river. This was the Vilcanota River, running north to Machu Picchu, where it becomes the Urubamba and continues north-east to join a tributary of the Amazon. The river flowed from Sicuani, past the glaciers above the crumbling town of Pisaq, and here, where our train was tooting, had formed the Sacred Valley of the Incas. The shape of this valley – so flat and green and hidden – in such a towering place, had attracted the Incas. Many had been here before the Spaniards entered Cuzco, and here others fled, fighting a rearguard action after Cuzco fell. The valley became an Inca stronghold, and long after the Spaniards believed they had wiped out or subdued this pious and highly civilized empire, the Incas continued to live on in the fastnesses of these canyons. In 1570, a pair of Augustinian missionaries – the friars Marcos and Diego – had the fanatical faith to take them over the mountains and through this valley. The friars led a motley band of Indian converts who carried torches and set fire to the shrines at which Incas were still worshipping. Their triumph was at Chuquipalta, near Vitcos, where for the greater glory of God (the Devil had made appearances here, so the Incas said) they put their torches to the House of the Sun. Some missions were established along the river (Marcos eventually suffered a horrendous martyrdom), but farther on, where the mountains and sky seemed scarcely distinguishable, the ruins were not re-entered. The valleys slept. They were not penetrated again until 1911, when the Yale man, Hiram Bingham, with the words of Kipling’s ‘Explorer’ running through his head (‘Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges – / Something lost behind the ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!’) found the vast mountain-top city he named Machu Picchu. He believed he had found the lost city of the Incas,
but John Hemming writes in The Conquest of the Incas that an even more remote place to the west, Espiritu Pampa, has the greater claim to the title.

  It was part of the Inca genius to seal themselves into hidden valleys, past rockslides and at the far end of precipitous trails that were lost behind the ranges. Their grasp of advanced masonry allowed them to build secure fortresses and posting stations out of these natural battlements. A few miles after we entered the Vilcanota Valley we came to Ollantaytambo, and if I had not made a separate visit to this place I would not have known how perfectly it had been sited, how the terraces, and the temple walls, could not be seen until one was on top of them. They are all but hidden from the railway tracks and the river, and what you see and think are habitations are Inca watchtowers, hundreds of feet up, tall thick-walled cottages on cliffs which aided the besieged warriors in warning them of Spanish attacks. Ollantaytambo was a success of sorts; over four hundred years ago, a regiment of Spanish soldiers led by Hernando Pizarro attacked this town, and they were defeated. ‘When we reached Tambo,’ wrote one Spaniard, ‘we found it so well fortified that it was a horrifying sight.’ The battle was bloody, and the Spaniards were beaten off by Inca slingers, Amazonian bowmen and Incas armed with weapons and wearing helmets and bucklers they had captured from their enemy.

  Inca symmetries have a graceful Biblical magnificence: behind these walls there are hanging gardens crowned by twenty-ton megaliths that were quarried several miles away and lifted to this summit. It was not specifically a fortress; it had first been a royal garden.

  ‘They must be for landslides,’ said Mr Fountain, going by.

  Bert Howie said, ‘Hey, what a terrific pair of shoes!’

  He was marvelling at my feet.

  ‘Leakproof,’ I said.

  ‘Hey, honey,’ said Bert to Elvera, ‘have a look at these terrific shoes.’

  But Elvera was still looking at Ollantaytambo. She mistook the clock-tower in the village square for a church and said she was reminded of the churches in Cuzco. The others mentioned churches in Lima, in Quito, Caracas, La Paz and even further afield; and so, as we travelled through the Sacred Valley of the Incas, no one remarked on the fields of wheat and corn, or the staggering heights of these cliffsides which had been plumbed by glaciation, or our progress into the sun beside this loud brown river. The mention of churches produced a discussion about religion, and with it, a torrent of muddled opinion.

  Those gold altars really get me, said one. I don’t understand why they don’t melt them down and feed some of these starving people. And the statues, said another: they’re so exaggerated, always bloody and skinny. Everyone was shouting and argufying at once: the Christ statues were the worst, really gory; the Mary ones were chubby and dressed up like dolls in lace and velvet; Jesus on the cross looked horrible among the gold carvings, his ribs sticking out; you’d think they’d at least make them look human. It went on: blood, gold, suffering, and people on their knees. Why did they have to exaggerate, said one man, when it only ended up looking vulgar?

  I had been hearing quite a lot of this. There was patronizing mockery in the pretence of bafflement and disgust. I just can’t understand it, they said, but they used their incomprehension to amplify their ignorance. Ignorance licensed them to indulge in this jeering.

  I felt my moment had come to speak. I had also seen those churches, and I had reached several conclusions. I cleared my throat.

  ‘It looks exaggerated because it is exaggerated,’ I said. ‘It’s possible that the churches here have bloodier Christs than those in Spain, and they’re certainly a lot bloodier than anything you’d see in the United States. But life is bloodier here, isn’t it? In order to believe that Christ suffered you have to know that he suffered more than you. In the United States the Christ statue looks a bit bruised, a few tear-drops, some mild abrasions. But here? How is it possible to suffer more than these Indians? They’ve seen all sorts of pain. Incas were peace-loving and pious, but if anyone broke the law he got unbelievable punish-ment – he might be buried alive, clubbed to death, staked out on the ground and ritually trampled, or tortured. High officials who committed an offence had heavy stones dropped on their backs from a high cliff, and virgins caught speaking to a man were hung by their hair. Pain wasn’t brought here by the Spanish priests, but a crucified Christ was part of the liturgical scheme. The Indians were taught that Christ suffered, and they had to be persuaded that his suffering was worse than theirs. And by the same token that Mary, the world’s mother, was healthier and better dressed than any woman in their society. So, yes, the statues are exaggerations of their lives, because these images represent God and the Holy Mother. Right?’

  Convinced I was right, I warmed to my theme. Mary in the Church of San Francisco in Lima, in her spangled cape and brocade gown and holding a silver basket, had to outshine any Inca noble and, at last, any Spanish woman of fashion. These divine figures had to be seen to exceed the Spaniard or Peruvian in suffering or wealth – they had to seem braver, more tortured, richer or bloodier in order to seem blessed. Christ in any church was more battered than the very battered leper in the plaza: he had to be. The lesson of the Peruvian – perhaps Latin American – Church demonstrated the extraordinariness of the Saviour. In the same way, the statues of Buddha as a mendicant showed a man who was hungrier and skinnier than the skinniest Buddhist. In order for you to believe in God it was necessary to see that God had endured a greater torment than you. And Mary had to look more motherly, more fecund and rich, than any other mother. Religion demanded this intensity in order to produce piety. A believer could not venerate someone like himself – he had to be given a reason for the holiness of the God statue. And he responded by praising it in the most appropriate way, by enshrining it in gold.

  After this, no one mentioned religion. They stared out of the window and said, ‘More pigs’ or ‘Look, is that a rainbow?’ And they went on talking in the off-hand Thornberry way that distracted them from what had become for them a dull and eventless train ride.

  There was a rainbow poised across the Urubamba. The Incas were the only people on earth, as far as we know, who worshipped the rainbow. And now we were close to what Hiram Bingham called ‘the last Inca capital’. The train stopped. Macchu Pichu was above us, hidden behind cliffs and outcrops of rock. The tourists were still chattering. I had foolishly told Bert Howie about the Victrola in my hotel and how I had played ‘Shanghai Lil’ on it. Bert said that Ben Bernie had been a Chicago boy, and he began to reminisce as he laboured up the path. High above Bert’s yakking head, the sun priests in beautiful robes had stood facing east every dawn on this steepest side, and when the sun, their god, began to blaze above the Andes, the priests extended their arms to it and (wrote Father Calancha in 1639) threw kisses to it … a ceremony of the most profound resignation and reverence.’ But we had not gone far; we were still near the river, which is troubled and dark, because it reflects the spongy foliage of the overhanging rock, not the sky. ‘The water looks black and forbidding,’ said Bingham, ‘even to unsuperstitious Yankees.’

  We continued to climb the steepness. The tourists chattered, stopping only to gasp; the gasping turned to complaint. It was not until the last step, at the brow of the hill, that the whole city was revealed. It sprawled across the peak, like a vast broken skeleton picked clean by condors. For once, the tourists were silent.

  18 El Panamericano

  The Panamerican Express is one of South America’s great trains, travelling over 1,000 miles from La Paz in Bolivia to the Argentine city of Tucuman. It crosses a national frontier – few in this hemisphere do – and railway travel is never more interesting than when it involves a border crossing. The frontier is nearly always a no-man’s land in which fascinating pieces of fraudulent theatre are enacted – the passport stamping ceremony, the suspicious looks, the bullying at customs, the foolishly patriotic pique, and the unexplained delays. I had walked across the Rio Grande from Texas to Mexico, and hiked from Guatemala into
El Salvador. I was looking forward to boarding a train in Bolivia and ending up, after three days on the Andean high-plains, in the heart of Argentina.

  But first I had to find my way out of Peru. By now, the railway strike had taken hold. Only one line was in operation; the train to Machu Picchu was being manned by the Peruvian army. This was strictly for the tourists’ benefit – too bad if you were an Indian who wanted to go home on any of the other routes. The miners were also on strike, and the municipal workers had occupied the city hall in Lima. The peaceful demonstrations had become angry mobs, and there were threats of sabotage on the Machu Picchu train. The workers’ demand was for £1.50 more a month. In Peru, two pounds of meat costs £1.50, and two pounds is all the average Peruvian family can afford each month. I was warned that if I did not leave Peru soon the buses, too, would be strike-bound; and though I had vowed in Colombia that I would not set foot on another South American bus – good heavens, I had a wife and children! – I had no choice but to take one to Puno.

  By train the trip would have been simple and enjoyable; by bus, it was dusty and harrowing, over a corrugated road. I could not read on this bus, and that day I abandoned my diary. We reached Lake Titicaca at sundown and crossed it in the steamer M.V. Ollanta in the dead of night. People tell you that this is one of the most enchanting trips on the continent. But I saw nothing: it was night. The last leg, from Guaqui to La Paz, was too brief to be memorable. I recall a puzzled Indian standing among boulders with a llama watching us pass. The llama was a special reproach to me.