The Andes: A Cultural History 0195386361, 9780195386363

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THE ANDES

Landscapes of the Imagination Patagonia by Chris Moss The Alps by Andrew Beattie Provence by Martin Garrett Flanders by André de Vries The Thames by Mick Sinclair Catalonia by Michael Eaude The Basque Country by Paddy Woodworth Patagonia by Chris Moss The Andes by Jason Wilson

THE ANDES A C U LT U R A L H I S T O RY Jason Wilson

1 2009

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Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2009 by Jason Wilson Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press Co-published in Great Britain by Signal Books All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wilson, Jason, 1944– The Andes : a cultural history / Jason Wilson. p. cm.—(Landscapes of the imagination) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-538636-3; 978-0-19-538635-6 (pbk.) 1. Andes Region—Civilization. 2. Andes Region—History. 3. Andes Region—In literature. I. Title. F2212.W557 2009 980—dc22 2009024668

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Contents Preface ix Introduction An Infinity of Peaks xi Lack of Air (xv)

Chapter One Adapting to the Andes Life among the Mountains 1 Andean Man and Woman (3); Condors (6); Guanacos, Llamas, Alpacas and Vicuñas (12)

Chapter Two Peru Traces of a Lost Empire 15 Cuzco: Navel of the World (15); Sacsayhuamán (25); Machu Picchu (26); Vilcabamba (32)

Chapter Three Peru Nostalgia and Violence 35 Santiago de Chuco: César Vallejo’s Andean Roots (35); The Andes Imagined (1): Mario Vargas Llosa’s Lituma en los Andes (39); The Andes Imagined (2): Ciro Alegría’s El mundo es ancho y ajeno (41); Cajabamba (45); Quechua (45); The Andes Imagined (3): Manuel Scorza’s La Guerra silenciosa (48); Quena (Qena) and Music (52)

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Chapter Four Peru Arequipa and the Cordilleras 55 Mount Coropuna (59); The Colca Valley (59); Chambi’s Andes (60); Ayacucho and the Shining Path (62); The Andes Imagined (4): José María Arguedas and Abancay (66); Bridges (68); Climbing the Cordilleras: Huaraz, Chavín de Huántar and Nevado Huascarán (69); Huánuco (74); Jauja (75); The Source of the Amazon (77)

Chapter Five Peru/Ecuador Cajamarca and the Inca’s Head 79 Chimborazo (87); Cotopaxi (90)

Chapter Six Ecuador Quito and the Volcanoes 93 Pichincha (97); Cayambe, Corazón, Illiniza (99); Hummingbirds (99); Earthquakes (100); Sangay (103); Ingapirca (103); Quipus (104)

Chapter Seven Ecuador Fear and Loathing in the Sierra 105 The Andes Imagined (5): Jorge Icaza’s Huasipungo (105); The Andes Imagined (6): Henri Michaux’s Ecuador (111); Pumas (112); Trains and Roads (113); The Andean Diet: Potatoes, Chicha and Maize (116); Coca (120); Quinine (121)

Chapter Eight Bolivia/Peru Tiahuanaco, Titicaca and the World’s Highest Capital 123 Aymara (125); Lake Titicaca (126); Puno (130); La Paz (133)

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Contents

Chapter Nine Bolivia Potosí: Mountain of Silver 139 Sucre (144); The Andes Imagined (7): Alcides Arguedas’ Raza de bronce (145); Tschiffely and the Indians (147); Oruro and Cochabamba (149); The Andes Imagined (8): R. C. Hutchinson’s Rising (150); Weaving (152); Andean Food and Markets (153); Guinea Pigs and Natural Viagra (156)

Chapter Ten Argentina Tales of the Empty Puna 159 The Andes Imagined (9): Héctor Tizón’s Fuego en Casabindo (159); Gorriti’s Andes (163); Roberto Payró and Catamarca (164); Ernesto Sabato and Lavalle’s Ride up Humahuaca (166); Andalgalá (167)

Chapter Eleven Argentina/Chile The Open Veins 171 Chuquicamata (171); The Andes from Above: Saint-Exupéry (173); Newbery and Plüschow: The Icarus Syndrome (176); Alive: Cannibalism and Survival (177)

Chapter Twelve Argentina/Chile Aconcagua: Sentry of Stone 179 San Martín’s Heroic Crossing under Aconcagua (181); “Galloping” Head and the Andean Passes (183); Bariloche (184); Osorno Volcano (189); The Patagonian Andes and Perito Moreno (190); Onelli’s Andes (192); The Mapuche (195); Aucanquilcha and Llullaillaco (198); The Andes Imagined (10): Marta Brunet’s Montaña adentro (199)

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Chapter Thirteen Argentina/Chile Poets, Patriots and Prisoners 201 “Deathly Quiet”: Gordon Meyer and San Martín de los Andes (203); Mount Fitzroy and Cerro Torre (205); Neruda’s Andean Crossing (208); Tupungato: Keenan and McCarthy (209); Cordillera Sarmiento/Mount Sarmiento (210)

Chapter Fourteen Colombia In Search of El Dorado 213 Popayán (215); Medellín and Cali (217); The Andes Imagined (11): Eduardo Caballero Calderón’s El Cristo de espaldas (221); Quindío (223); Bogotá (224); Tequendama Falls and Lake Guatavita (228)

Chapter Fifteen Venezuela Where the Andes Meet the Caribbean 231 The Andes Imagined (12); Lisa St. Aubin de Terán’s The Hacienda (231); Arepas and Ají (235); Conrad’s Andes (237); Caracas (238); Humboldt and La Silla (240)

Glossary 243 Further Reading Index of Literary & Historical Names Index of Places & Landmarks

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Preface To write about the Andes is a daunting task, not only because of the mountain range’s great length and heights, but because words written about it cross so many disciplines, creating a verbal Andes. My approach is to look at the mountains through the differing perspectives of writers and travellers, but also those of food historians, geologists, mountain-climbers, anthropologists, archaeologists, terrorists, pilots and more. I have avoided personal details in favour of a collage of explorers and writers to catch the sense of the Andes as an alien zone visited by outsiders. I have always cited the author’s name so that the book in question can be pursued in the bibliography. Some names recur—Humboldt, Perito Moreno, Tschiffely, Neruda, Theroux, Torres—as Andean guides, others make more fleeting appearances. I have also drawn on the words of insiders, of writers born and raised in the various countries that share the vast Andean chain. Some are established, and others are hardly known outside their immediate readership, but all contribute to casting light on the enigmatic Andes. I have tried to organize this formidable literary journey by starting from Cuzco, the navel of the Inca body politic, and spreading south and north along the great Inca routes. The journey takes us from Peru through Ecuador and Bolivia, Argentina and Chile, Colombia and Venezuela, perhaps the least Andean of the South American nations that live in the shadow of the mountains. By focusing on fiction and travel writers (the best are both) but not ignoring other ways of turning the Andes into words, I am aware that the core of the Andean experience lies outside writing, outside the Spanish language and beyond urban centres. As an outsider looking at the Andes, I have become aware of Andean resistance to rational interpretation and analysis, perhaps a consequence of thin air, isolation, dangers, fading traditions and the inexorable abandonment of the extraordinary Inca social experiment. Spelling from Quechua or Aymara or Mapuche varies, as do mountain heights.




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My thanks as ever go to Andrea, my family, Anthony and friends and the ever alert James Ferguson. Most of the translations are literal and mine and there is a small glossary. This book is dedicated to Kai and Luke Hawker. Jason Wilson London, 2009

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Introduction

An Infinity of Peaks From the top of Cerro Catedral, 7,888 feet high, the conical snow-capped peaks of Argentina’s Andes rise into the clear blue sky as far as the eye can see. It is beautiful, bleak and eerily silent. The thin, dry air shrinks distances and makes the surrounding mountains appear crystal clear. It is like arriving on an alien, lifeless planet. A vein throbs in my temple and an unwanted fear grips me. The fear relates to death and the absence of human habitation. This is not merely personal death (lack of oxygen, giddiness, cold, blood pressure) but a glimpse of our irrelevance, of a windy, stony world before and after us.
The Andes mountain chain rises with the aptly named Pico Cristóbal Colón (Spanish for Christopher Columbus) on the Caribbean coast of Colombia at 18,701 feet or with Pico Bolívar, at 16,354 feet in Venezuela’s eastern range. It runs for nearly 5,000 miles down the entire west side of the South American continent in sometimes parallel ranges, through Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. It stretches some 450 miles at its widest. The Chilean Nobel Prize-winning poet Gabriela Mistral reversed this rocky north-to-south journey and described the Andes as running northwards from Chile to Colombia, “from my Straits to Santa Marta” (she probably means the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta). Whichever way one chooses to follow it, it is the longest mountain chain on earth. In a footnote to his essay “The Plateau or Table-land of Cajamarca, the ancient capital of the Inca Atahualpa and the First View of the Pacific Ocean”, Alexander von Humboldt, who had walked along much of the Andes in 1801-2, explored the etymology of the word “Andes” and traced it back to the exiled Inca writer Garcilaso de la Vega, who had referred to the “mountains of the Antis”. Anti was one of the four Inca provinces and the name of a people. Later interpretations derive the name from Anta, xi

Cordillera Blanca, Peru

Introduction—An Infinity of Peaks

Quechua for copper, and the historian William H. Prescott called them “the copper mountains”. Humboldt finally admitted, however, that “the original signification of the word is buried in the darkness of past ages.” The mestizo Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, son of a conquistador distantly related to the great Spanish poet Garcilaso and of an Inca princess, was eight years old when Cuzco fell to the Spanish and recalled what his ancestors thought about the Andes. He had left Peru at the age of twenty, christened Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, and because the Incas had no writing had asked his uncle to recount all he knew. He read the Spanish chroniclers as well. The Inca Garcilaso fought for Spain against the Muslims in the War of the Alpujarras. He then became a man of letters, a translator and a chronicler. He published the first volume of his account of the Inca world and mind in Lisbon in 1609, the second in 1617. For a while after Túpac Amaru’s rebellion against the Spanish crown in 1780-81, the book was banned in Spanish America. He died in 1616 and is buried in Córdoba cathedral in Spain where “perito en letras” (skilled in letters) is engraved on his tomb. He insisted on how the Spaniards misunderstood the natives from the start, as even the word Peru was the name of a person and not a place. The Incas used the term huaca to mean several things at the same time—from idol or sacred object to monstrous things such as twin lambs or freak natural events. The Incas also called all mountain peaks and slopes huaca, which they worshipped with offerings because they were productive and not because they were idols. The Spanish reduced the word huaca to idol and hence decided that the Incas worshipped peaks. The “cordillera” (Andes), he wrote, is long and eminent and “admirabilísima a quien la mira con atención” (most admirable for whoever looks at them attentively). We will look at them with due attention. Mario Vargas Llosa’s entry for “Andes” in his Diccionario del amante de América Latina (Dictionary of the Lover of Latin America, 2006) opens with a mental image of the Andes as a dehumanized landscape, inhabited only by a condor and llamas and guanacos, a pre-Hispanic territory of ruined civilizations that can only be reconstructed in the mind (and which go back some 4,000 years). Above all, the Andes remind him of man’s fragility and insignificance, for the mountains are uncontrollable and violent, prone to eruptions, earthquakes and avalanches. The English author Anthony Daniels concurred with his insight, remarking that “no xiii

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landscape… so unmercifully exposes one’s own insignificance.” The early chroniclers of the Spanish conquest of Latin America had little time for picturesque description amidst their culture shock and hunger for gold and bluntly referred to “high cold mountains”. Yet Pedro Cieza de León, who fought in the Andes against the rebel Gonzalo Pizarro in the 1540s and travelled throughout the region, penned one of the first and best descriptions aimed at a European readership in his 1550 Crónica del Perú (in J. M. Cohen’s translation): The range of mountains called the Andes is accounted one of the greatest in the world, for it is known to begin at the straits of Magellan and stretches right through this kingdom of Peru, traversing innumerable lands and provinces. It contains great numbers of high mountains, some of them covered with snow and others belching fire. These highlands and mountains are very difficult for travellers since they are densely wooded and it rains there for most of the year. The ground is consequently so dark that one has to proceed with great care. For the roots of the trees come up through it, covering the whole mountain, and make the cutting of roads for horses very difficult…

Cieza de León meandered into the world of marvels when he wrote of shemonkeys who tempt men to copulate with them and then give birth to hairy half-men, half-monkey progeny. He added that he had never seen them, but that it was nevertheless not beyond belief. The Andes have always inspired mythology, fantasy and a sense of awe. The mountains I stared at from Cerro Catedral were like Gothic steeples pointing up to Pascal’s eternal silence of terrifying infinite space. In pre-conquest times gods inhabited these forbidding places as they did for the Greeks on Mount Olympus. The Incas believed the peaks were closer to their sun god Inti and to the god of thunder, lightning, hail and rain called Illapa who fertilized the famous mother-earth, Pachamama. Dante thought that earthly paradise lay atop the Mount of Purgatory— but hell can be up there too. Trapped in our lower worlds, in comforting horizontal and urban lives, we perhaps need to be reminded of what lies above. The mountains are both sacred and frightening. In 1932 Carleton Beals, a radical American journalist based in Mexico, voiced thoughts xiv

Introduction—An Infinity of Peaks

shared by many: “Though I visit the Andes out of curiosity, I will never love them. They are too brutal, too vast, too remote. They have lifted me to frightful agony of body and soul, to grand awe, but I always want to escape quickly.” The Belgian surrealist poet and painter, Henri Michaux, visited Ecuador in 1927. He scribbled a quick Spanish-titled poem “La cordillera de los Andes”, which recorded his first reaction to the disappearing horizon and enveloping clouds—“like faithful dogs of the mountains”—as “terrible and close to despair”.

Lack of Air This elevation is dangerous for the heart, for the lungs and for the stomach; mountains are not just picturesque, but permeate the newcomer’s body in the form of pressure headaches and giddiness. Once I was stuck at La Quiaca (over 11,000 feet), on the closed frontier between Argentina and Bolivia, with pounding headaches that only coca-leaf tea alleviated, a victim of soroche or puna as altitude sickness is called. Another time at Cuzco (11,440 feet) my legs turned heavy as lead. More recently, a friend felt so awful that he was rushed to Cuzco’s hospital. The unwary can die of hypoxia or lack of oxygen, as did the DJ John Peel (“Thin Air of Peru Killed Peel”, Sunday Mirror). When Charles Darwin was up the Andes in the 1830s he only felt a slight tightness across his head and chest, and on finding fossil shells high up on Peuquenes in the Chilean Andes, he boasted: “I entirely forgot the puna in my delight.” Travelling the Andes on horseback, the Swiss Aimé Félix Tschiffely’s sickness took the form of nose-bleeds. He found that his horses and mules also suffered from soroche, the cure being to gash the roof of the horse’s mouth, so that loss of blood relieved pressure on the brain, or to mix crushed garlic with alcohol and blow it into the horse’s nostrils. His own treatment consisted of eating raw onions. Hiram Bingham saw muleteers punch holes in their mules’ ears and bleed them to stop soroche, while the colonial traveller Concolorcorvo compared soroche to sea-sickness and recommended cold water and meat or hen broth with much crushed hot ají or chilli peppers, that staple and fiery Andean spice. The Peruvian writer Daniel Alarcón has a character who complains that “taking a breath was like swallowing sharp knives”; so cold is the air and his head is so painful that it “might separate from my neck and just float away into the threatening Andean sky.” No words can exaggerate this sickness. xv

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There is also something secretive and remote about the Andes. In Henry Shukman’s novel The Lost City (2007), the young protagonist looks for La Joya, the fabled lost city of the Chachapoyans in the Andean cloud forest. The Andes, he asserts, are “feminine, they keep their secret knowledge to themselves.” As he crosses a high pass into this forgotten territory in northern Peru, it “seemed the outer reaches of a whole new hinterland with secret savannahs, lakes, cities all its own.” The journalist Patrick Symmes, following in the tracks of Che Guevara in 1995, also saw “an alien world of ancient Incas, llamas and lost fortresses, of guerrillas and drug traffickers, of inscrutable peasants and isolated lives.” Famously, Machu Picchu was so detached from the known world that it was never found between the Spanish arrival in 1530 and 1911. This idea of the Andes as closed-off, as secretive, recurs throughout this book, as does the sense that it is like no other place on earth. I will try to point out what makes the mountain chain unique, from its geology to its agriculture, through its religions, fallen empires, mines, myths and people. This involves a good deal of psychogeography, the effects of landscapes on the feelings and behaviour of individuals, though usually this discipline is confined to the urban, eccentric and pedestrian. I think of the Andes as an axis mundi up and down which run currents that have gripped the imagination of countless mountaineers, geologists, travellers and writers. It tells many stories that I have grouped around landmark mountains, valleys, towns and villages, as well as around the writings of those who have lived in or visited this vast region. In terms of South America, such stories and consciousness clash with those of the lowlands and coasts where most of the great urban centres lie and continue to expand. Ecuador, for example, is divided in terms of cultural geography into rivalry between Guayaquil on the tropical coast and Quito up in the clouds (inhabited by longos, a pejorative word from the Quechua for Indian). In Bolivia there is clear antipathy between the altiplano dwellers and those from the tropical valleys. Peru is equally split into three zones, both cultural and geographical: the dry coast of Lima and Chimbote; the treeless tableland of Inca ruins; and the low-lying jungle—so much so that even language conforms to this division, with Quechua, not Spanish, spoken in the forgotten mountains. This language was named after a tribe, the Keshwas, meaning “warmvalley people”. In the 1970s the guerrillas of Sendero Luminoso ruthlessly xvi

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tried to carve up their own Maoist-inspired republic of Quechua-speakers, like another closed Tibet. The Colombian revolutionaries known as FARC named their independent republic Marquetalia in 1961 controlling forty per cent of Colombian territory in the deep Andean valleys. In Bolivia, under President Evo Morales, there have been autonomy struggles between Santa Cruz and La Paz, between the Andean indigenous uplands and the lower tropical plains. The people of the Andes rarely form part of any homogenous nation state. Because of centuries of racism and the staggering death rate following the violent conquest of some ninety million indigenous Americans, I refer to the native peoples of the Andes simply as Andeans. The vastness of the Andes challenges our perception and language. The mountains offer “an enormous complexity of a tangle of ranges and plateaux” making any panoramic view impossible, wrote the Canadian anarchist George Woodcock. Patrick Leigh Fermor refers to an “infinity of peaks retreating to an enormous distance.” Paul Theroux questioned the adequacy of the word Andes to describe such a vast range with many nameless mountains. Flying above and along the Andes from Bogotá to Santiago is to witness a landscape of endless corrugation. Luis Valcárcel saw the range from the air and called it a “rough sea turned to stone”. How can one word—Andes—encompass so much? This chain of volcanic peaks defies national boundaries and human habitation and stands as a monument to another time-scale and to another relationship with the expanding cosmos.

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Chapter One

Adapting to the Andes Life among the Mountains The Andes are some forty million years old. Though relatively new in geological terms, the mountains started to rise around one hundred and eighty million years ago. As Simon Lamb reveals in his personal account of a decade spent in the Bolivian Andes, the range rises as the Nazca plate under the Pacific Ocean glides into molten earth under the Andes, pressing against the solid Brazilian shield so that horizontal layers tilt. The whole range, viewed from satellite pictures, is made of solidified magma. Lamb suggests that the mountains are “wave-like” and tells us that for each mile a mountain rises it pushes seven miles down below the surface. It is as if the Andes have rocky roots several miles down, an image that consolidates the sense of Andean solidity, holding up the peaks even as they still rise. The Andes are indeed still rising, mainly because of the crunching up of granitic matter from tectonic plates and sudden irruptions of magma from volcanoes. The mountains lie on a fault line, which explains their sixty active and numerous dormant volcanoes as well as constant earthquakes and tremors. Most of the surface rock is solidified magma, with andesite (named after the Andes) the most typical volcanic igneous rock and volcanic ash. Lamb defines the rocks of the Andes as mostly intermediate between basalt and granite. When in March 1835 Charles Darwin set off for the Portillo Pass, between Argentina and Chile, he stopped and meditated on the shingle and shells he found high in the Andes: “No one fact in the geology of South America, interested me more than these terraces of rudely-stratified shingle.” It convinced him of the truth of the geologist Charles Lyell’s geological theory of the slow rising of the Andes. Back home in Gower Street, London, when he summarized what had most impressed him during five years of sailing around the world in the Beagle, he listed the Brazilian jungle, the Patagonian plains and the “lofty” Andes. In awkward words, he 1

Adapting to the Andes—Life among the Mountains

relived this experience: “When looking down from the highest crest of the Cordillera, the mind, undisturbed by minute details, was filled with the stupendous dimensions of the surrounding masses.” The Andes break up into diverse regions: areas of permanent snow and glaciers; the altiplano (high plains) between western and eastern mountain chains; the puna above 13,000 feet, cloud forest, lakes, deserts and volcanoes. It rains from the forests on the east, while the cold Humboldt current controls the desert coast with its “garúa” mist. The Andes are also the source of the world’s greatest river system, the Amazon.

Andean Man and Woman How quickly or slowly the human species adapted to the Andean heights is hard to calculate, but the process probably began around 12,000 years ago. Isolation, the classic evolutionary condition for the inheritance of physiological traits, was instrumental, as was natural selection. The variability for adaptation built into the DNA double helix is sprung into action by reaction to physical habitat—here extreme altitude with thin air. Indigenous people in the Andes are generally stocky and barrel-chested, with alveoli in their larger than normal lungs absorbing all the oxygen available. According to Lorus and Margery Milne, they have twenty per cent more blood than lowlanders and a higher ratio of red corpuscles, so their blood is thicker and pumped less often. Their hearts are larger too. The writer Eric Lawlor met a Chilean in the high Bolivian capital of La Paz who insisted that the Englishman should lie down as much as possible to ease his throbbing heart. “Native Americans” or “Indians” first crossed the Bering Straits from Asia when there was a land bridge some 15,000 years ago—though this rough date is still receding. There were several migrations, but all began from the north and moved down south. Indigenous Americans only mixed with Europeans after 1492. This racial and cultural mestizaje (mixing) is still evident in the Andes in the form of caste and geographic divisions between Indians, mixed-race cholos with “white blood and customs” and “whites”, though in the growing urban conglomerations the melting pot or “cosmic race” represents the future of a continent of mestizos in every sense. Adapting to the extreme environment, Andean people can walk barefoot in freezing conditions or in sandals called ojotas because between their 3

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arteries and small veins they have far more capillaries than lowlanders to keep blood circulating to heat the feet. Their bodies consequently resist cold, and absorb more oxygen. The sailor and author Tristan Jones could not believe that the indigenous Aymara stood for hours fishing on Lake Titicaca’s shore with bare feet in the freezing water. In 1903 C. H. Prodgers, on his way to warmer lowland rubber plantations, noticed that all the Bolivian children he saw were barefoot in the cold. Another characteristic of highland Andeans is their ability to walk fast, even run, with heavy loads up and down hills and steep streets. The eighteenth-century chronicler Concolorcorvo said that if men could be compared to dogs, the Indians of the region would be “greyhounds”, not just because they are fast, but because they trot up and down perpendicular paths. Coca leaves help them, of course, as we shall see. Even so, the question of genetic adaptation is unresolved, as lowlanders can quickly adapt to altitude, even if Andean people can seemingly better withstand the cold. In any case, there is nothing romantic about bare feet. The Peruvian writer Manuel Scorza has a scene in his 1970 novel Redoble por Rancas (Drums for Rancas) where an Indian returns to his mountain village after his military service and dares to wear shoes. The local boss forces him to take them off. In fact, during colonial times indigenous Andean people were forbidden to dress like Spaniards. The American photographer Loren McIntyre found few people living above 15,840 feet anywhere in the Andes. When Charles Darwin reached around 14,000 feet, he found walking extremely hard, and his breathing was deep and laborious. He was told that it took a year for newcomers in Bolivia’s Potosí to adapt, and that onions were excellent for the puna or soroche, what Robert Macfarlane calls AMS (Acute Mountain Sickness). The physiology of altitude adaptation may sound quaint, but it has serious consequences for football. FIFA has banned international matches being played at over 8,200 feet for medical reasons, but Andean countries (Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador) have objected, with football-fan Bolivian president Evo Morales taking the lead. They accused rivals like Brazil and Argentina of swaying the governing body. The Atahualpa Stadium in Quito, Ecuador, lies at an altitude of 9,186 feet, while the Hernando Siles ground in La Paz stands at over 11,000 feet. Is coming from the highlands an unfair advantage when playing at such a height? Arguably not, for what happens when an Andean-born player descends to sea level? 4

Adapting to the Andes—Life among the Mountains

More generally, what happens when migrant highland workers, as they do in increasing numbers, go to live in Guayaquil, Lima, Trujillo and Chimbote? Aimé Félix Tschiffely (1895-1954), the Swiss traveller who rode the length of the Andes and one of the literary figures who reappears throughout this book, feared that Andean-born individuals succumbed to illnesses far more easily at sea level. Indeed, after nearly a year at high altitude, he found that down in Lima his ear hummed and buzzed and he heard noises like bells ringing for weeks. Nevertheless, Lima throngs with highland Andean communities living in shanties, called barriadas or pueblos jóvenes. Old, colonial Lima is surrounded by Andean migrants. Its population has exploded to over seven million, many of them ambulantes, street vendors selling their wares as if still in upland markets in Cuzco or weaving their ponchos. José María Arguedas, the Peruvian anthropologist and novelist (about whom more later), wrote to John Murra in 1967 claiming that seventy per cent of people in Lima and Chimbote were from the Andes. The Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist, who travelled throughout Latin America in 1967, called this the “greatest migration in history”. But Andean-born people are different in other, more profound, ways. John Hopkins, who had lived in Morocco and was a friend of Paul Bowles, developed this idea in his travel notes of 1972-73. He travelled down from Mexico with a mistress and her parrot, hoping to kindle his creativity in the form of an abandoned manuscript he lugged about with him. After months in the tropics, the thought of the mountains that he knew from three previous trips made him exclaim: “Already I feel an ache for the Andes. Thin air, space, clear vistas, bracing cold.” While stuck in Huánuco, Peru, he observed “something so heartbreakingly sweet and gentle and fragile and hopeless about these mountain Indians.” He wrote of the beardless young men with their “shocks of straight black hair” and the women with clear skin like “fine porcelain” and their “doll-like children with huge solid eyes” (he comes close to cliché, but captures their physical presence). They appear to have nothing, he thought, confusing boundless energy with implacable inertia, being both nimble and sluggish, or quick to giggle over nothing and yet seemingly affected by a profound sadness. He concluded that the people of the Andes would be “so much better off if left totally alone in their mountains, where they seem quite capable of resurrecting their civilization.” Since Pizarro and the other conquistadors vanquished them they have gone on “living at altitudes where no one else can 5

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breathe” and “probably have changed their ways as little as any race on the planet.” He calls this indigenous persistence the “mask of the Andes”. Despite all the foregoing, I am aware that there might be no unchanging “Andean man and woman”, that what defines the inhabitant of the mountains is not merely physical, but geographical and cultural, what Flores Galindo called belonging to a particular place, a village or ayllu (clan). Another Peruvian thinker, Luis Valcárcel, even defined Andean man as someone who identifies with the past, in a unique Inca link. His work Tempestad en los Andes (Storm in the Andes, 1927) located the future there: “The Andes are an inexhaustible fountain of vitality for Peruvian culture. Neither the Incas nor the Indians of today have lost their telluric balance.” The anthropologist William Stein lived in the village (called estancia) of Hualcán in the valley known as the Callejón de Huaylas between the peaks of the Cordillera Negra and Cordillera Blanca in Andean Peru between 1951 and 1952. The village sits under the 20,212-foot Hualcán peak and the area around is one of subsistence farming. His 1961 study gives a meticulous picture of how people live, their relationships with the village and the world—they are not isolated and often go down by train to Chimbote to work. In a footnote Stein observes how the locals breathe in from the diaphragm, their abdomens and chests hardly moving, their heartbeat slow and blood pressure low. He adds that “during my stay in Hualcán I never ceased to marvel at the ability of the Indians to move about on the hills.” He was also interested in personal and social rules—the oddest being the use of fermented urine as a cleaning fluid, shampoo and substitute soap. High altitudes affect the colon and produce more wind, just as opening a can of fizzy drink high up can lead to an explosion. Alcohol has a greater and more immediate physical effect, as it does up in a plane. Hence, people fart more, but there are also fewer smells as food does not rot, and, of course, sunbathing can be lethal. Lastly, there is that “Andean phenomenon: not a drop of sweat” (in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s words), for dryness mops it all up. The air is so dry that Andean faces, said my daughter, seem like tissue paper.

Condors An emblematic non-human inhabitant of the mountains’ unique environment is the Cóndor Andino or Andean Condor, the great symbolic bird 6

Adapting to the Andes—Life among the Mountains

of South America, with a wing-span that vies with the Giant Albatross, reaching fifteen feet according to Alexander von Humboldt, who derived the word from the Quechua cuntur. We have all seen this gliding carrion bird circling high up, keen eyes scanning up to five miles away as it “spreads its mystical plumage” in Pablo Neruda’s words. It is the highest flier of all birds, resisting suffocating air pressure. Condors are also known to hunt live prey like newborn lambs or goats. Neruda evoked this skill metaphorically: “The black cyclone planes down/and falls like a cruel fist.” Two very different Argentine presidents identified with the condor. Domingo Sarmiento, the liberal educator and writer, had one carved atop his mausoleum in La Recoleta in Buenos Aires, while Juan Domingo Perón, the popular demagogue, had a stuffed bird on his desk in the same city’s Casa Rosada. Isidore Ducasse (1846-70), the Uruguayan-born decadent poet who wrote under the pseudonym of the Comte de Lautréamont, evoked wild horse races with a friend along the Uruguayan beaches, as if they were “flying side by side like two condors from the Andes, gliding in concentric circles high up in the air near to the sun, feeding on the pure essences of light.” The beauty of the condor lies in its soaring flight; otherwise it is just a large vulture, or “coffin” in Neruda’s words. Its beak and bald head are ugly with folds, though its white Elizabethan ruff makes it regal, like an inbred monarch. Darwin admitted that “it is truly wonderful and beautiful to see so great a bird, hour after hour, without any apparent exertion, wheeling and gliding over mountain and sea.” The condor is so bound to the Andean landscape that the arid peaks and cold are reconstituted in the bird. The condor’s Latin tag Vultur gryphus alludes to the mythical Griffin with its eagle’s head and wings and lion’s body. This fabulous and ferocious beast stood for cruelty, even the devil, and in Greece protected treasure and gold as an emblem of vigilance. The Andean condor has lent its name to sinister organizations such as Operation Condor in Pinochet’s Chile and the southern cone, or Hitler’s airborne Condor Legion in civilwar Spain, but also to countless medals, travel agencies, journals, songs (Simon and Garfunkel’s “El Condor Pasa”) etc. Charles Darwin shot a condor that measured eight and a half feet from wing tip to wing tip. All that he learned about the birds he picked up from locals: they lay two eggs on a bare rock on cliffs, making no nest; the young cannot fly for a year; adult birds live in pairs but are gregarious; 7

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they can last five weeks without food. He did not know, however, that they live up to seventy-five years. On his trip up the Santa Cruz river in Argentina, Darwin saw a “grand spectacle” with some twenty condors starting heavily from their resting-places and wheeling away “in majestic circles”. He marvelled at their gliding: “I do not recollect ever having seen one of these birds flap its wings.” When the giant birds get closer you hear, according to Clemente Onelli, a strange noise, like the hum of monstrous insects, as the wings slice the air. Sadly, condors are also easily hunted as they cannot take off without a long run. Shepherds place a carcass inside a wall of sticks, wait for the birds to land and gorge themselves and then charge in on horseback and kill them. Hunters also find the trees where they sleep and tie them up as condors are apparently very heavy sleepers. It is telling of Andean isolation that the first proper scientific study of condor habits was begun by Gerry McGahan only in 1968. In César Vallejo’s posthumous poem “Telluric and Magnetic”, where from Paris in the 1930s he sarcastically evokes the “Sierra of my Peru, Peru of the world,/and Peru at the foot of the globe”, he includes one line out of sixty-three in brackets: “Cóndores? ¡Me friegan los cóndores!” (Condors? Screw the condors!). Clearly he was sick of the bird’s Peruvian symbolism, or perhaps he was fed up with the so-called Poet of the Americas, the Peruvian José Santos Chocano (1875-1934), whose famous stanza from the poem “Love for the Jungle” reads: “I want to be a condor, boast/of trapping a bolt of lightning in my beak/and so, proud, regale you with a wing so that you can turn it into a fan.” Santos Chocano, a frantically antiAmerican poseur who identified with Spanish and Inca nobility, was mysteriously assassinated in a Santiago tram in 1934. His battle cry from the bombastic Alma América (1906) was: “I am the primitive soul of the Andes.” Vallejo, born high up in the Andes, possibly also reacted against his own assumption of being an Inca in the early poem “Huaco”, meaning “vessel”, where, in Clayton Eshleman’s translation, he asserts: “I am the fledgling condor plucked/by a Latin harquebus;/and flush with humanity I float in the Andes/like an everlasting Lazarus of light.” Here he merges Inca and Christian histories, as Santos Chocano had done. Condor identification began early. The weeping god of Tiahuanaco, carved in larva near Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, holds a staff ending with condor heads. I once saw a beautiful gold condor’s head in the Gold 8

Adapting to the Andes—Life among the Mountains

Museum in Bogotá. When a Peruvian emigrant intellectual like Ventura García Calderón synthesized his sympathy for the Andean people’s fate, he chose a symbolic condor, as in La venganza del cóndor (The Condor’s Revenge, 1924), where a giant bird shoves the evil captain off a cliff. García Calderón was born in France, the son of an ex-president, was racist and reactionary and remained in Paris. As Efraín Kristal shows, it was against the view of the indigenous Andean as somehow impenetrable that twentieth-century Peruvian thinkers fought. Yet, despite his foreign view, García Calderón knew his Andes: I returned to Peru to search for silver mines. Mines: that means stern solitude where one sleeps in the outdoors, fully clothed, with the revolver in its holster, warming up against your invaluable companion of adventure, that is a Peruvian mule. I would consciously travel ten hours a day on the back of my mule. My task was to climb the Andes… Alas, I did not have the talent to be a prospector. I had found, all the same, the themes of the short stories I was going to write in the future.

The oddest ritual concerning the condor is the Turupukllay (indigenous ritual) of 28 July, which José María Arguedas fictionalized in his novel Yawar fiesta (1941), where in the puna (high plain) of Puquio a revered bull named Misitú has a condor ceremonially attached to its back. The bull is then let loose while the condor pecks at its neck. The bull represents the Spaniards, and the condor the indigenous people. Finally, the condor is set free. This violent ritual is banned by law, but in the 1980s Nicholas Shakespeare met an Indian who had witnessed it. Tony Morrison described seeing this “barbaric” event in the village of Paruro in 1968. He witnessed how the condor’s claws were tied to the bull’s hide with leather thongs. Then a handful of stinging chilli peppers were plunged into the bull’s anus and the ferocious ritual began. Morrison drove up the Callejón de Huaylas to see a variation of this condor contest. At Huaylas a live condor was suspended on a wire between two posts and horsemen charged to punch it with their bare fists, while the condor pecked and clawed back. The final conqueror had to bite out the bird’s yellow tongue. Its death, a tradition invented by the Church to belittle condor worship, was seen by the Andeans as a good omen. 9

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The Argentine chronicler Roberto Payró noted that condors were still a minor divinity and symbol of immortality at the end of the nineteenth century in Andean Catamarca, their dried, pulverized hearts turned into a drink to prolong life. Clemente Onelli learned from the Tehuelche in the Patagonian Andes that eating the condor’s heart raw cured angina and other heart problems. What about the Cóndor Real, the King Vulture, supposedly larger than the white-ring necked ones, and all white? Humboldt estimated its wing spread at twenty to twenty-five feet and reckoned that only twentyfive existed in all the Andes. C. H. Prodgers only heard about these regal birds from local people and set out to hunt one by luring it with a dead llama, but he fell off his mule and hurt his back (and never saw one). At the Jura Inca baths outside Cajamarca he heard another tale about the giant Cóndor Real from someone who shot one, but could not collect it as several smaller condors picked it up and flew off. Humboldt obviously never saw one. If he had, he would have seen that this bird, in Latin the Sarcoramphus papa, is smaller than the Cóndor Andino, lives in the jungle up to 4,000 feet and is solitary, with a poor sense of smell. (So much for the word “royal”.) The Bolivian novelist Alcides Arguedas includes a parable about the condor in his 1919 novel Raza de bronce (Bronze Race), concerning a retarded shepherd with the nickname Mallcu (meaning old condor). For two years an old and ferocious condor has been stealing cattle. Locals find this bird, which knocks cows down steep hills with a swing of its wings, so tough that they assume it is the devil himself. They turn to witchdoctors (yatiris), dogs and rifles until the patrón manages to shoot it. Even wounded, the condor fights off the dogs so well that the boss decides to keep it as a pet and covers it—symbolically—with the national flag. Once it has recovered from its wound, it swoops on to a pig and flies off into the sky. One day alone on the mountain slope, the idiot shepherd boy sees the condor’s huge shadow as it carries off one of his sheep. He climbs up to its lair and swings a stone with his sling and kills it. He brings the “ave simbólica” back to his village, and thus earns his nickname. If the condor is indeed a messenger of the gods, perhaps the music of the flute called the pinkullu, made from long condors’ bones, best communicates with these deities.

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Guanacos, Llamas, Alpacas and Vicuñas When the Spaniards arrived in Peru, they mistakenly called the beasts they saw “sheep”. But they were in fact Andean camels—the next clue to the region’s unique environment. Guanacos evolved in the high tablelands, living wild up to 12,000 feet in altitude. They roam in huge flocks feeding off the tall bunch grass called ichu. Their name has come to mean “thick” or “stupid” in Spanish, invoked in common phrases like “no seas guanaco” (don’t be stupid). Like the camel, the guanaco can go without water for weeks, and has special hooves with a claw to prevent slipping on ice. According to a note in the Ambrosetti Museum in Buenos Aires, these animals can only carry up to sixty pounds in weight and walk fifteen miles a day. According to Tschiffely, they only feed after the sun has set. My first encounter with one was in a zoo, where it spat, typically, on to my shirt. Ronald Wright met a herd as he hiked on the Inca trail to Machu Picchu. After watching him with “feminine, disdainful eyes”, one of the beasts spat and a “cud of chewed grass and saliva” struck his cheek. The Incas domesticated the guanaco as the “llama”, a beast of burden and a source of sun-dried meat called charqui (from the Quechua); corrupted, the word leads to the English “jerked” beef. Its hide is used for leather, its fat for candles, its hair for rope and cloth and its dung for fuel (for firewood is lacking so high up). Llamas belonged to the Inca emperors and were hunted for food for their army. Indeed, in 1555 the Spaniard Zárate found llama meat “as clean and succulent as the very fat mutton of Castile”. Later, C. H. Prodgers judged llama wool “quite the best kind of rope”. But the llama was too weak to be ridden and it gave no excess milk like goats and cows. Researchers in present-day Bolivia have found that shepherds castrate male guanacos, as they then carry more, and select a leading llama, called a puntero, place a bell around his neck and let him lead thousands along the caravan routes in the Andes. The Incas also domesticated the alpaca for its white fleece, and again for sun-dried meat. As Prescott noted, nobody owned these animals, as there was no private property among the Incas. Alpacas had much longer wool; indeed, Tschiffely described them as “huge woolly balls”. The wool was carded and spun and dyed into wonderfully coloured and designed ponchos and warm clothes. As many as 190 different hues have been recorded. The Inca emperor wore his alpaca gown only once, and each day it was burnt and a new one supplied. Vicuña hide was so precious that 12

Adapting to the Andes—Life among the Mountains

by the early 1930s, these animals—wild relatives of the llama and alpaca— were threatened with extinction, according to Tschiffely, and ponchos made from their skin were waterproof and offered protection from both heat and cold. In Mario Vargas Llosa’s 1963 novel La ciudad y los perros (The Time of the Hero, 1966), a tale of turning teenagers into men in a military academy—and exploring guilt, failure and cowardice across all classes in Peru—we glimpse a single vicuña as antidote to the sweaty boys and officers. A character tells us: It astonished him to find that exclusive animal of the mountains walking intrepidly between the grey walls devoured by the humidity of the Colegio Militar Leoncio Prado. Who had brought the vicuña to college, from which region of the Andes? The cadets wagered by firing blanks: the vicuña was barely worried by the impact of stones. It walked slowly away from those shooting, with a neutral expression. “It’s just like the Indians,” thought Cava.

The Andes seem as distant from the coastal academy, as distant from Lima and Callao as the Andeans themselves. The vicuña re-appears in the novel as a sad animal, staring into emptiness, uncontaminated by aggression or violence. When Gamboa, a decent officer, is banished at the end of the novel to the provinces, he says: “I’ll see many vicuñas… and perhaps will learn Quechua.” So what is it that is special about this animal? The American travel writer Blair Niles guessed right, watching them “pass through the streets of Ríobamba with heads high, stepping with a dainty, disdainful precision.” The most perceptive description of the llama comes from another outsider, the half-Peruvian Flora Tristan, in 1838. Her approach is almost scientific, but it also touches on their innate dignity: The llama is the beast of burden of the Cordilleras, and the Indians use it to trade with the valleys. This graceful animal is very interesting to study. Of all the animals to have had dealing with man, it is the only one he has never been able to debase. The llama will not consent to being beaten or maltreated. It will make itself useful only on condition that it is asked and never ordered. Llamas always travel in flocks and the Indian

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who leads them walks a long way in front. If they feel tired, they stop, and so does he… Their long majestic necks, shining silky coats and timid supple movements give them an expression of nobility and sensitivity which commands respect. This must be so, as the llama is the only animal in the service of man which he dare not strike.

She emphasizes their frugality, their refusal to take on too much, their longevity (up to thirty-four years) and how they often sit down and die if shouted at or beaten. Nobody, she concludes, would have the patience to coax them to move or work except the Andean Indian, and explains why: “the moral strength necessary to escape oppression through death, so rare in our species, is very common among the Indians of Peru.” The idea of the llama as human was memorably developed by the American writer Thornton Wilder into a parable of animal sensitivity: “a llama (a lady with a long neck and sweet shallow eyes, burdened down by a fur cape too heavy for her, and picking her way delicately down an interminable staircase).” Llamas, he remarks in The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), are deeply interested in human beings and even pretend to be them, inserting their heads into human conversations. Anthony Edkins’ poem “Irish Pet Zoo” sees alpacas as superior to humans, opening “Two alpacas are chewing/assiduously,/occasionally/looking into the distance/and ignoring/the alien species/observing them./You address them in Spanish/to remind them/of far-off Chile/but it makes no difference/and they continue to chew.” Maybe we should address them in Quechua.

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Chapter Tw o

Peru Traces of a Lost Empire We all know the story of the conquest of the Incas (the word meaning the emperor but applied to a civilization), perhaps through reading the historian William H. Prescott (who never went to Peru). That the Spaniards, led by the Pizarro brothers, illiterate swine-herds, destroyed a complex empire, the largest in the world at that time, without any scruples, in the hunger for gold and glory and that the Incas were noble, refined victims is the legend. Yet, despite much research, the story of this clash of civilizations still thrills, especially if you are there on the spot. The ruins and stones in and around Cuzco (or Cozco as the Inca Garcilaso spelt it) still speak to us of imperial power and beauty.

Cuzco: Navel of the World Cuzco stands high at 10,856 feet, and was the apex of the Inca dynasty. It means “navel”, the place where the Incas were tied umbilically to the cosmos. It is the oldest inhabited city in the Americas, established around 1200 BC and is an oasis in the altiplano, with a river running through it. Nearby peaks, like Ausangate at 20,945 feet, dominate the city. The Inca world was divided into four parts or suyu that expanded territorially with Cuzco rooted at the centre. All four roads led to Cuzco, as this book leads out from Cuzco along the Andes. It was here that the Sapa Inca and his main mistress, the coya (usually his sister), lived as direct descendants of Inti, the sun god, himself issued from Viracocha, the androgynous creator at the centre of Peruvian religious culture for over 2,000 years. The city was also divided into four zones, corresponding to the four regions and where people from these regions were forced to live in ghettos. The first effect of arriving in Cuzco is felt inside your body in the form of leaden legs, giddiness and altitude sickness. I arrived there in 1970 after a frightening flight from Lima (there had been a crash weeks before). The red-tiled roofs, the countless churches and incessantly tolling bells 15

The stones of Cuzco: “tightly pressed together in loving embrace”

Traces of a Lost Empire

and the colourful Andean inhabitants made it seem more Latin American than the Lima I had left. Paul Theroux, who also travelled the length of the Andes, writes how Andeans sell “alpaca sweaters, rugs, ponchos and knitted caps on every street corner”, observing that they have a “broadbased look, like chess pieces”. He adds wittily: “they are stocky and squat and you think, looking at them, that they would be impossible to tip over.” The inhabitants, especially the women in their multicoloured woollen shawls, babes on their backs, long plaits and bowler hats, strike all visitors—although Patrick Leigh Fermor disparagingly called them “squaws”. After Cuzco fell, the capital of the viceroyalty moved to Lima so that E. George Squier, a traveller in 1876, found Cuzco further away than Berlin or Paris for most educated limeños. The author Patrick Symmes, tracing Che Guevara’s travels on his motorbike, invents a pun to explain this distance between Lima and the “cold and wild mountains, where Peru was more a notion than a nation.” The link between the Andes and the Inca empire is stone. From Pizarro’s triumphant entry on 15 November 1533 and sacking of its gold and precious stones Cuzco became a hybrid city. The Christian Santo Domingo, a seventeenth-century church and convent, was built on the walls of the Temple of the Sun, the Coricancha (which meant “place of gold”), probably dating from the fifteenth century under Pachacuti Yupanqui. It was where a dressed-up gold idol called Punchao was hidden and where the mummies of the Incas were also seated, including Huayna Capac, the last Inca who consolidated Cuzco’s magnificence. His death by plague—for European diseases preceded the Pizarros—had led to the civil war between his sons, the brother heirs Huascar and Atahualpa, which weakened the Incas (indeed, Atahualpa was the thirteenth Inca in line). The asymmetrical way in which the huge, mortar-free stones fit hermetically into each other is deeply skilled. Eduardo Galeano evokes them as black stones “tightly pressed together in loving embrace, victors over the furies of the earth and of man.” Touching these stones in the Callejón Loreto (which was called Inti Kicllo or Street of the Sun) or the Calle Triunfo opens out one’s imagination. Sacheverell Sitwell deemed this corner the “archetypal scene of Cuzco”, while Che Guevara wrote in his dairy that the sole word to “sum up Cuzco adequately is evocative.” In fact, the Temple of the Sun only fully exists in verbal reconstructions, beginning with the early chronicles, then Inca Garcilaso’s careful re17

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construction and then Prescott’s. How these blocks were carved and placed is now known, and that they resisted earthquakes and the Spanish invasion and still stand solid is miraculous. They were also plated in gold, which was quickly peeled off and melted into ingots. The relatively recent Inca empire, which began with Manco around AD 1000, was structured on organizational and administrative efficiency still visible in the marks left behind. It was a practical not philosophical culture. The Inca Garcilaso wrote of his people that “they did not know how to raise their understanding to invisible things” and that all their theology revolved around mother-earth (Pachamama). Most telling as key to how this empire worked are the straight roads that allowed fast military access, representing engineering feats equal to the Romans. Rebecca StoneMiller calls them “the world’s largest archaeological monument”. The longest branch traversed the Andes from Quito to northern Chile, some 3,600 miles. Sometimes the roads become steep steps as they go up and down Andean crags, fit only for pedestrians. Relays of fast-running couriers (chasquis) took twelve days to bring news on quipus (see p.104) from Cuzco to Quito, some 2,800 miles, and faster than horse or mule. Every twelve to twenty miles stood the rest-houses (called tambos) along the routes, which also functioned as granaries in case of drought or shortage. Everywhere terraces jut out that allowed abundant food to be grown, from potatoes and maize to quinoa and quinine, irrigated by acequias (actually an Arabic word) that brought water to these dry altitudes. Terrace building is an art form, a sculpting of the Andean mountainsides, and can appear mesmerizing today. Luis Valcárcel called this building of terraces or andenes the “domestication of the mountains”, a way of taming the steep inclines. The royal accountant Agustín de Zárate, in his 1555 chronicle known as The Discovery and Conquest of Peru, deemed the Incas “very skilful and industrious irrigators”. Guano, manure formed by centuries of sea bird droppings, was brought from the coast to fertilize the soil. Then there were sacred spots and forts. All this work with stones was to subjugate the Andes and can be read in landscape script. Sitwell rightly labelled Cuzco “the strangest place in the world”. The Inca state was rigidly theocratic and military and left little to individual choice. It was communal, with the ayllu at its base, and it was despotic. All marriages were mass marriages, arranged or forced. When an Inca emperor died, so did his wives, concubines and intellectuals, called 18

Traces of a Lost Empire

amautas (later this was the name of socialist thinker José Carlos Mariátegui’s influential magazine of the 1920s). There was no money, and gold and silver were used for religious and artistic purposes. There were neither beggars nor buggers (sodomites were burnt alive, had their houses burnt down and even their trees uprooted). Each new emperor re-wrote his history to suit him, so there is no “history”. Mario Vargas Llosa found that Orwell’s novel 1984 best evokes life in the Inca empire. Tristan Jones thought it the most “efficient, fascist corporate state the world has ever known.” Vargas Llosa also claimed that current-day Peruvian melancholy derives from old Quechua songs lamenting the forced loss of home. The Marxist Mariátegui in a fundamental essay of 1928 agreed that state and religion were so bound that when one was crushed so the other vanished. The Incas were largely materialistic, with little speculation about the afterlife but espousing a moral code (a trinity formed by the maxims do not lie, do not steal and do not be lazy) rather than anything more metaphysical. Their worship and use of stone hint at such materialism. When the Spaniards arrived, they sacked Cuzco for its gold and silver, melting nearly all that was either brought to Cajamarca for Atahualpa’s release (see p.84) or what they found as gold and silver plates on the walls or in the famous garden where all the plants, animals and even butterflies were made of gold. Even the gold and silver works preserved and sent to Spain were melted by Charles V. Yet the Spaniards also brought scribes, who recorded in invaluable words what they saw. A shared perception was how high up in the sierra Cuzco was, how “rugged” the peaks were, and how cold it was. It was even colder than the wind-swept plains of Castile and so cold that even the horses caught colds. But the chroniclers had little leisure to evoke the details of the actual landscape, though the city of Cuzco struck them all. One claimed that Cuzco was grander than Rome, another grander than Burgos. The stunning stonework, wrote one, “greatly improves on that of Spain”—even though the Incas did not use tiles but straw for roofing. The fort above the city, Sacsayhuamán, was “proud and great”: grudging admiration from practical men in the most bizarre of situations, making sense of a totally alien civilization high up in the sierra. The Inca Garcilaso remembered his father’s grand house, with a long narrow balcony above the main door from where local dignitaries watched bullfights and catching-the-ring games (sortija) on the plaza. He recalled that there were no flies and no biting mosquitoes. From here one saw the 19

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Sierra Nevada (Garcilaso did not employ the word Andes) as a “pyramid” without ridges, just pure, perpetual snow. This peak was called Uillcanuta, which meant “sacred thing”. In 1843 the well-off Bostonian Prescott published his romantic and best-selling version of the conquest of Mexico. He followed this in 1847 with his conquest of Peru. His vision of Cuzco reads like fiction today. That he was first blind in one eye and at times completely blind and that he never visited Cuzco or Peru is part of the story. He met people who had been there and corresponded with Humboldt, but had to imagine it from reading texts as he dictated his narrative. He wrote to a friend: “I am within six months of completing Peru—I am now writing with my hands dripping with Pizarro blood.” Later historians of the conquest, with John Hemming at the fore, have found much to fault in Prescott. For example, Prescott called the main Andean alcoholic brew chicha, made from fermented maize, “sparkling”, while Hemming more accurately describes it as “a pleasant murky drink like stale cider”. (This was because he has been there, tasted it and was familiar with the topography and the landscape.) He describes Hatun Rumioc, the great stone in Cuzco, as a façade with “no fewer than twelve corners, some convex and some concave, but all interlocking with uncanny precision into the adjacent stones of the wall.” Hemming cites witnesses to Inca Cuzco and picks on the stones as its “most impressive artistic legacy”. He names the interlocking stones used—greenish-grey diorite porphyry and Yucay limestone—while the polygonal walls strike him as “baffling and impressive” (nothing like this enters Prescott). But the most acute description of these Cuzcan Inca walls comes from the Peruvian writer José María Arguedas (1911-69). He promoted the myth that he was brought up as a Quechua-speaker, but was in fact a misti (it means white in Quechua) or mestizo with a fair, blue-eyed father and a white mother who died when he was four. Under his stepmother he made contact with the Quechua world of the servants, and identified with them as a “kind of orphan”. He inherited what he calls “the war of languages”, the bitter divide that ruled Peruvian society. He worked as an anthropologist, empathized with the Andean Indians and wrote novels exploring the opaque indigenous mind for uprooted urban readers. He shared the belief that “mountains and rivers are endowed with life,” as he said in an interview. He was a rebel, once imprisoned in 1937-38 for protesting 20

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against the Spanish dictator Franco. Such was his inner struggle about identity that he finally killed himself. Arguedas’ semi-autobiographical 1958 novel Los ríos profundos (Deep Rivers) opens with the arrival of the teenage protagonist Ernesto in Cuzco with his father. He has been brought up with fabulous stories about the city and rushes out to inspect the walls. We read: “I touched the stones with my hands; I followed each rippling line, as unexpected as rivers, where the stone blocks met. In the dark street, in the silence, the wall seemed alive; on my palms the joints in the stones that I had touched burnt me.” He finds them even stranger than his father’s stories, for the “wall was static, but it boiled along all its lines and its surface was changing, like rivers in summer.” Ernesto shouts in Quechua “Puk’tik, yawar rumi!” at the wall, meaning “stone of boiling blood”. Every stone is different and they move (who can better this approximation?). His father explains that the Indians could turn stones into mud and reshape them. Then, inside the baroque, early seventeenth-century cathedral, Ernesto discovers a fundamental analogy between the Inca stone walls and the Andean peaks: It was an immense façade; it seemed to be as wide as the base of the mountains that rise from the shores of some upper lake. In the silence, the towers and atrium repeated the slightest sound, just as the stone mountains did on the shores of frozen lakes. The rock bounced back the cries of the ducks or the human voice.

The boy questions his father so that we learn that Cuzco’s main square, the Plaza Mayor, is Inca, built by Pachacuti. The world is not round but long, he is told; we walk the length and breadth of it. Ernesto sees things that grown-ups do not, and there is no better evocation of Cuzco than the opening of this novel. However, I did not like the city. Nicholas Shakespeare partially explains why: “Cuzco is an unpleasant town, the centre of a region where two civilizations have not mixed but curdled.” He lists the snarling dogs, women selling synthetic jerseys, the din of pinball machines in the arcades (and, I would add, the milling tourists). A late nineteenth-century version of Cuzco provincial life crops up in Clorinda Matto de Turner (she married an Englishman) and her novel trilogy. She was born in 1852 in Cuzco, the daughter of a small landowner, and mixed with the misti, the poor whites. At that time, the town had a 21

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population of 17,372, but was cut off from Lima and Europe. She was bilingual in Spanish and Quechua and as a journalist wrote about local life, collected as Tradiciones cuzqueñas. In exile in Buenos Aires, she translated parts of the New Testament into Quechua. She first visited Lima in 1877 and lived there as a widow and writer from 1886 where she founded a political magazine Los Andes (she got into trouble with the Church and her home was sacked). Her readers were clearly from the capital, and she wrote to teach them (and us) about their own, forgotten hinterland. Her best-known work is the 1889 novel Aves sin nido. Novela peruana (translated as Birds without a Nest. A Story of Indian Life and Priestly Oppression in Peru, 1904), and her characters live in the fictional Andean villages of Killac (probably Tinta where she lived at the time) and Rosalina, small enough for everybody to know everybody. The novel is dense with details of local colour from what is worn to what is eaten: “stuffed guineapig” or chicha made from quinoa and rice. It is an early witness novel about the sexual and economic exploitation of the Andeans, a landmark in what became a continental movement called indigenismo. The novel was banned, she was excommunicated and an effigy of her burnt in the street. The doomed love story has Margarita and Manuel discover that they are brother and sister, fathered by the local bishop and his Andean mistress. The novel is melodramatic and has aged, but the background details are authentic. Matto de Turner died in 1909 in exile. In truth, her life is more gripping than her writing. The main plaza of Cuzco was also where the Indian rebel José Gabriel Túpac Amaru II (his name can be translated as “Royal Serpent”) lost first his tongue, then his head on 18 May 1781. After his tongue was cut out, he was pulled apart by four horses “so that he was stretched in the air like a spider,” reported a contemporary account. Finally, his head was cut off and he and his wife, her tongue cut out publicly, were burnt to ashes. So was Tomasa Condemaita, who led the women’s battalion, two uncles of Túpac and a painter Antonio Oblitas, who dared to paint his portrait. The public watched in silence; there were no Indians to be seen. While this was happening, a sudden downpour occurred and the cuzqueños ran for shelter. The contemporary account added: “As a result of this the Indians are saying that the heavens and the elements were lamenting the death of the Inca whom the cruel, impious Spaniards were putting to death so inhumanly.” 22

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Pablo Neruda retold Túpac’s story in his alternative verse history of Latin America, the Canto general. The poem addresses the Indian as “Condorcanqui Tupac Amaru/wise lord, just father” because he was one of the early rebels against imperialism in the name of the “humiliated peoples”. (José Condorcanqui was his real name.) The poet reminds us of his death by drawing and quartering, but “Tupac hides in the furrows/they say silently ‘Tupac’,/and Tupac germinates in the earth.” Túpac Amaru II embodies Andean revolt and became a codeword for later revolutionary groups, including the Guevara-inspired urban guerrillas of Montevideo, the Tupamaros of the 1970s and Peru’s MRTA (Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru). The son of a cacique or chief from Tinta, with a mestiza wife, who had inherited 350 mules to ply the Cuzco to Potosí trade route, he had conceived of himself as a messianic Inca king for the disinherited. He hated the mita or forced Andean labour and believed that the last Inca chieftains would be reinstated—this was known as the Inkarrí myth (the word combines Inca and rey, Spanish for “king”). But most of all he hated the Spaniards, called “red necks” or puka kunka. A Spaniard was defined as a white or someone who dressed like one or a landowner. It was a racist war. When his army killed whites, they were ritually mutilated; their blood was drunk, their hearts were ripped out, their genitals removed. His army of 30,000 failed to seize Cuzco in 1781 and a huge bounty was put on his head. Kenneth Andrien reckons that his rebellion cost 100,000 lives. At one time he had liberated 600 square miles of Andean Peru. He was the forerunner of Simón Bolívar, Miranda, Sucre, San Martín and other leaders intent on breaking away from imperial Spain. Maruja Torres, the Barcelona-born novelist and journalist, noted the “survival of the past” in every building in Cuzco, a past just as visible in the Indians who wait, or seem to wait, for the departure of the whites, on benches, under arches. That is her elaboration of the prophecy of the return of the Incas. One last link between Cuzco, the Andes and the dormant past is volcanic. The city has suffered earthquakes, and Inca masonry took these constant threats and tremors into account. In the cathedral on the main plaza is a famous effigy of a skinny black Christ called “El Señor de los Temblores” (The Lord of Tremors) who is paraded during Easter to much praying and sobbing. This Christ might be Christian, but the way the 23

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Indians relate to him is not. The writer George Woodcock found this Christ “brown with candle smoke of centuries”, more Indian than European, and their “substitute for the lost Gods”. In fact, the plaza was called the Huaccaypata, which meant the Platform of Supplications (“Imploraciones”), and such lachrymose pleading goes far back into time. Prayers were offered to Christ to stop the tremors, to appease the angry mountain. Inherent to the Inca mind was mountain-god worship, apu, and none was more dramatic than the Inca sacrifices on Nevado Ampato at 20,700 feet, some hundred miles from Arequipa. Apu meant both peak and one of the main gods in the Colca valley region, according to a Spanish priest in 1583, and sacrifice appeased the god as supplier of water. There is no doubt that the Incas climbed this peak as they left a mummy of a young woman dressed in alpaca wool, buried with ritual goods like gold figurines in doll’s clothes, maize, llama bones, coca leaves—all frozen for 500 years until recovered by climber Miguel Zárate. In 1995 nearby Nevado Sabancaya (19,600 feet) erupted, blowing ash miles into the sky. After the mountains had shaken and moved, the fallen mummy was revealed to Zárate and his archaeologist colleague Johan Reinhard. According to Reinhard, the young woman was wrapped in a dress (aksu in Quechua), encircled by a chumpi or belt and wore a shawl, tied with a silver pin and leather slippers. Human sacrifices were carried out in Cuzco. Boys and girls were buried alive or strangled or had their hearts cut out. J. Alden Mason claims that human sacrifices were rare, but ten-year-olds in perfect physical condition were offered to sacred objects or places called huacas (pronounced “waca”). According to the chronicler Agustín de Zárate, huaca meant “to weep”, for, he said, Indians “actually do weep on entering these temples.” And they still weep in front of saints and virgins. Tomography revealed that the mountaintop mummy had died from a blow to her head. The annual pilgrimage called Qoyllurity by a glacier some 17,000 feet up near Mount Ausangate, six hours by bus from Cuzco and led by Indians called ukukus, who carry whips and imitate llamas in high-pitched voices, is a parable of how to incorporate the mountain gods. The extreme height and cold are life and death tests in an Andean Station of the Cross, founded on a miraculous vision from 1783. Hugh Thomson climbed up to the pass, saw a nameless glacier and communicated with the apus of the range. He interpreted this experience as “the transference of the power 24

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of a sacred mountain”, as the pass stood on the ley lines called ceques spreading out from Cuzco and dividing the world into four parts. There were 41 of these invisible lines that linked peaks and divided water rights. This initiation rite, without alcohol but with countless endurance tests, forces the Andean landscape to penetrate the pilgrim as a wordless spiritual force. Later the Christ was carried back to its church in Ocangate. The account I liked, which let me relive my own trip there, was Ronald Wright’s in the 1980s. He called Cuzco his Mecca and distinguished himself from the tourists, who ruin the ruins, as a “vagrant scholar”, learning Quechua in order to communicate with the runas (his preferred term for Indians) while still remaining an “obnoxious foreigner”. He is perceptive in his account of how history is latent in the stones, about the hostel he stays in, the blind musicians and market sellers.

Sacsayhuamán Just outside and above Cuzco lie the magnificent remains of the fort, called a pucara, begun in 1440 by the Inca Pachacuti and finished in 1520. Leigh Fermor, an experienced traveller and well-stocked with comparisons, judged the fort “one of the most impressive bits of fortifications I’ve ever seen.” In 1970 I had the haunted place to myself. My taxi-driver dozed, the guide was paid off and there was one cameraman with his tripod, who took a picture and vanished. Huge stones are beautifully interlocked in irregular patterns and run in three parallel zigzagging walls for over 1,300 feet, with countless bastions. One of the stones weighs 361 metric tons. Looking down on Cuzco, the walls’ undulations mimic the mountain range behind them. It was also a sanctuary and temple to the sun, with an altar cut out of the solid rock. It has been partially dismantled, with four towers missing. Hemming summarizes its feel as one of “masterful strength and serene invincibility”. Peter Matthiessen agrees that the site is “still mighty”. Under the fort, water was stored in stone sewers. The stones themselves had come from quarries at Ollantaytambo and Huaccoto. The fort saw a desperate battle in 1536 between the Spaniards under Juan Pizarro inside Cuzco and up to 100,000 rebellious Indians led by Manco Inca and his orejones (big ears, the Spanish name for Inca aristocrats who wore gold earrings). The one hundred and ninety Spaniards managed to break out of Cuzco, besiege and take the fortress in what was a turning point in the war. Juan Pizarro was killed by a stone from a sling, while 25

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Manco Inca withdrew to his hideout at Vilcabamba (more on that later) and became a bandit. This last Inca was finally trapped by the Spanish in 1572, brought back barefoot, manacled, with a gold chain around his neck and beheaded in the main plaza at Cuzco, a site that has witnessed many executions. Ernesto’s father in Arguedas’ Los ríos profundos claims that the walls of Sacsayhuamán are dangerous and that they devour children. Ernesto strangely asks him if they sing at night like rivers or precipices, for the Incas allegedly enchanted the stones to make the fort. As I wandered the stones I had my own flash of insight for I saw that these citadel walls looked like ripe corn on a cob on its side, each grain fitting asymmetrically perfect into the next. Yet I remain baffled as to why asymmetry pleases so “deeply”, as the boy Ernesto would say. Paul Theroux thought the fort imitated the shape of a puma’s jaw. Victor Wolfgang von Hagen thought it “without doubt one of the greatest structures ever erected by man.” Back in 1928 when the young Peruvian Augusto Flores, who was walking from Buenos Aires to New York, arrived at Zaccihuanán (his spelling) he found it in a terrible state of ruin and “descuido” (neglected). He tells a tale of the stone that bled. Twenty thousand Indians had been dragging it along and somehow it crushed thousands to death and so “cried blood.” Another version tells of the huge “tired stone”, too tired to have joined the others in the walls and so left abandoned on the road. More recently, Isabel Allende’s woman conquistador Inés, in her 2006 historical novel Inés de mi alma (Inés of my Soul), reaches Cuzco from Spain, and is especially struck by this sacred fortress “with its three lines of high, sharply zigzagging walls”, claiming that Sacsayhuamán meant “satisfied hawk”, watching over Cuzco below. She, like her creator Allende, marvels at the close-fitting blocks. But it is hard to convey such impressions on the written page; Ronald Wright found it too exceptional and alien “to reveal itself in words.”

Machu Picchu If any site in Latin America conjures up a strange sense of déjà-vu, then it is the view from above of the ruins of Machu (meaning old) Picchu. So many tourists have taken the five-hour trip in the winding train from Cuzco up and then down into the Urubamba river gorge or set off along the Inca Trail with rucksacks for a four day hike that there has even been 26

Machu Picchu: “High city of stepping stones” (Neruda)

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a threat of sealing it off (like the Lascaux caves in France or Stonehenge). And then there are the countless posters, postcards and photographs. It is a tourist cliché, and yet I agree with Patrick Leigh Fermor’s evocative description from his visit in 1971: “It is a lonely, hushed, mythical place of unforgettable beauty, severity and strangeness.” I was there in 1970, wandered among the ruins and mugged up the hypothetical history, caught in the mystery of how this hill fort and city survived the colonization of what the Spaniards at first called Birú. Everything about the site is a wonder, from how the stone buildings flow from natural rock formations and yet again, to the terraces, the viewpoints from Huayna (meaning new) Picchu peak, the staircases and the sundial called intihuatana (where the sun is tethered to stop it travelling further north). I refused to take photos, thinking, mistakenly, that I could absorb the spirit of place more deeply. I was on my own, with no chatter to disturb the experience, and I remember standing gazing down at the ruins when a multicoloured, long-legged wasp landed on my shirt to remind me that I was also in the tropics. There is an argument that the shock of a first impression is better than ideas pre-acquired from a guidebook. Nobody knows the city’s real name, as Machu Picchu is the name of the peak whose saddle it is grafted on to, standing at 7,478 feet, some 3,000 feet lower than Cuzco. It was supposedly built by Pachacuti around 1450. As is well known, the place was discovered in 1911 by a gringo, Hiram Bingham, from Yale, a professor of Latin American history with a degree in literature and funded by the National Geographic Society. Recent evidence shows that a German tomb robber, Augusto Berns, was there in 1867 ransacking the hill fort. The last Inca fled the invading Spaniards and retreated over the highlands and peaks and hid in inaccessible Vilcabamba. Bingham evoked this event in his Inca Land (1922). It is not surprising that Pizarro found it impossible to follow the Inca Manco over passes which were higher than the very summit of Mont Blanc. In no parts of the Peruvian Andes are there so many beautiful snow peaks. Veronica (19,342 feet), Salcantay (20,565 feet), Soray (19,437 feet) and Soiroccocha (18,197 feet) are outstanding features of the landscape. Some of them are visible for a hundred miles. None of them have been climbed so far as it is known.

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Bingham was no archaeologist. He had travelled before from Buenos Aires to Cuzco in 1908 and was a mountaineer. The whole area had only just been opened up with a road blasted along the river rapids. Led by a local Indian, Bingham climbed up towards some ruins. It was hot, humid snake-country and they often had to go on all fours. They reached terraces cleared by some Indians who lived there. Then Bingham came across Inca stone work: A semi-circular building whose outer wall, gently sloping and slightly curved, bore a striking resemblance to the famous Temple of the Sun in Cuzco… It followed the natural curvature of the rock and was keyed to it by one of the finest examples of masonry I have ever seen…

In his words we read the first outsider’s view of the abandoned, secret city. Bingham noted the pure white granite stones, and their flowing lines and symmetrical arrangement. It took his breath away. As he strolled around the ruins, “surprise followed surprise in bewildering succession.” Once again, the stones spoke. One wall with niches near the Torreón or Temple of the Sun was so stunning that Bingham called it “the most beautiful wall in America”. He also dug up a cemetery with fifty bodies, of which only four were male. Later, Bingham married a Tiffany heiress, became a senator, was impeached, and left 12,000 photos in the Yale archives. `(The Peruvian government is now claiming back his booty from Yale.) In October 1943 the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda quit Mexico, where he had been consul general, for home. On his way he stopped in Peru and visited Machu Picchu with his wife, the Argentine Delia del Carril, and a Peruvian friend. The president lent them mules as there was no road up from the train below. Two years later, at home in Isla Negra, he wrote a poem titled “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” (misspelling the name, but never correcting it) celebrating his pilgrimage. Literary critics have seen it as his crucial poem, later incorporated into his mammoth rewriting of Latin American history as the Canto general (1950), for in it he rejects the previous subjective surrealist poet he had been to become the poet of his people. The year 1945 was also the moment he joined the Chilean Communist Party, and it was the start of the Cold War. The two years between the climb and the poem’s publication suggested to critics that was less about the actual site than about Neruda’s political re-orien29

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tation. Yet the poem does offer a reader a mountaintop vision. Neruda said later: “Now I saw the whole of America from the heights of Macchu Picchu.” It was in Machu Picchu that Neruda felt truly Latin American, as he surveyed the whole continent in his mind’s eye. He wrote later that he sensed himself to be “Chilean, Peruvian, American”. He identified with the anonymous workers like “Juan Cortapiedras, hijo de Wiracocha” who had built the city and felt re-born as their brother and their spokesman with the closing line: “Speak through my words and my blood.” What he had seen was not a tourist’s dream-site, but a place where hunger and exploitation had existed. We catch actual descriptions of his ascent: Then I climbed the ladder of the earth Through the atrocious tangle of jungles Up to you, Macchu Picchu High city of stepping stones…

Neruda then releases one of his metaphors (that is what Machu Picchu does to its onlookers): “Mother of stone, foam of condors.” The associations are obvious—mother earth, mother of independent America, high up where the totemic condors fly, all condensed into one line of awe. When Neruda reads it in his mournful voice, this line is like a prayer. A tactile poet, he suggests that hands and touching are the ways to grasp the Inca retreat: the grain of maize, the vicuña’s hooves and bare feet that “touched the ground and the rocks/until they knew them in the dark or in death.” For this site—“this Andean reef of glacial colonies”—is the dwelling place, “the high place of a human dawn” that in its silence is “a life of stone after so many lives.” He then asks his reader to climb up again in the poem and to “kiss the secret stones” and invokes the river below, the “torrential silver of the Urubamba”. Neruda deciphers the hidden language he hears in “Wilkamayu of sonorous strands” (real cascades in a river of that name) and refers to the sundial: And on the Clock the bloody shadow Of a condor crosses like a black ship.

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Section IX is a verbal construction—yet without verbs—of this stone shrine, where Neruda, in a baroque frenzy, piles up comparisons, opening with: Astral eagle, vineyard of mist Lost bastion, blind scimitar … Buried ship, source of stone. Horse of moon, light of stone. Equinoctial squadron, steam of stone. Final geometry, book of stone.

I include these lines because of the repetition of the talismanic ending word “stone”. The shape of the saddle where the ruins lie is compared to a scimitar—hardly a New World symbol, but appropriate because it is curved. There are further successful metaphors (some are terrible): “Essential cordillera, marine roof” and “Mineral bubble, quartz moon”; it ends: “Wave of silver, flow of time.” (I borrow Stephen Kessler’s translation for that last line. There have been at least twelve translations into English of this long, wordy and ponderous poem.) In 1952 the young Argentines Ernesto Guevara and Alberto Granado travelled to Machu Picchu as “reluctant tourists”, before Ernesto became either Che or a doctor. He was a fan of Neruda, and was later to fight in the Sierra Maestra of Cuba with a copy of Canto general in his back pocket. His travel account was published as The Motorcycle Diaries some forty years later and turned into a film. On the mountain top Guevara read Bingham’s book as his guide. He was shown a recess in the stones in the building reserved for the soldiers with a hole just big enough for a man’s arm. It was apparently, he writes, a place of punishment—you put both arms through the holes and are then pushed backwards until your bones break. Guevara doubted this, put his arms in and was given a gentle push by Granado. He “immediately felt an excruciating pain and thought I’d be torn apart if he continued pressing my chest.” The asthmatic Che was most struck by the place as a “pure expression of the most powerful indigenous race in the Americas, untouched by contact with the conquering civilization.” He was clear that one has to be a South American to really appreciate this experience, and no doubt saw it through Neruda’s vision. 31

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When Paul Theroux set off for Machu Picchu by train from the Santa Ana station, he recorded sarcastically countless conversations with fellow travellers, mocking the Americans from Ohio as much as the rucksack brigade. When they finally climbed up to the site, he writes: “It sprawled across the peak, like a vast broken skeleton picked clean by condors. For once, the tourists were silent.” Despite his disdain for the tourist, his metaphor is excellent (better than most of Neruda’s) and his tact in not describing the ruins and his experiences is wonderful. Words are too tired to convey such a place: photos do it better and there are shelves filled with photo books. More evidence of Inca occupation emerges around Machu Picchu, including terraces excavated on the north side. After perusing Bingham’s archives, Hugh Thomson set out in 2003 to explore Llactapata nearby in the cloud forest. Informed about “archaeo-astronomy”, he came to believe that Llactapata is aligned with sacred peaks to specific buildings in Machu Picchu. Leading an expedition of 17 explorers, 8 muleteers, 12 horses and 25 mules, he stumbled on the ruins, which have a direct view of Machu Picchu and are linked by an Inca road. On the way back, the group passed under Mount Salcantay (20,500 feet, meaning “wild”) on the road that leads to Vilcabamba, the last hiding-place of the Incas. Salcantay, “a great savage chunk of a mountain”, he writes, is one of the “fathers” of all mountains. Knowledgeable and witty, he inspects the Sahuite stone, carved from andesite (a dark, volcanic lava), praising the amazing carved puma. His personal account of the Andes remains one of my favourites, including the parts about bringing his family to stay in a valley outside Urubamba, under the towering peak of Pitusiray. In George Squier’s words, “a more beautiful place than this does not exist in all of the Andes.”

Vilcabamba As John Hemming has carefully narrated, Vilcabamba is the lost jungle city of the Incas, a mysterious name linked with gold and escape from the Spanish conquistadores, for which Machu Picchu was just an outer fort. It is where Manco retreated and where he defeated Gonzalo Pizarro as he crossed a rocky hillside. Furious at being outwitted, Pizarro tied Manco’s wife Cura Occlo to a stake, and had her beaten and killed by arrows. He then floated her down the Yucay river so that Manco could see what had been done to his wife. But Manco remained in the jungle and built terraces 32

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and villages, in what Hemming describes as a tranquil native state. Then the Inca was stabbed in the back by some Spaniards hiding with him. In 1572 the Spaniards decided to attack Vilcabamba. There were clashes and the Spaniards reconquered Vitcos, high above a valley. When they entered Vilcabamba, it was burnt down and deserted. That was the end of the Incas. Yet where this city was actually sited remained an enigma. It was associated with the place called Choquequirau, where Hemming himself went, stunned by its views of the mighty Apurímac, a silver ribbon in its great cleft in a canyon, waterfalls, forested hillside and snow-capped peaks in the distance. Bingham, for his part, thought Machu Picchu was Vilcabamba. He located a Spanish mining town called Vilcabamba at 11,750 feet, but there were no Inca ruins. Later expeditions in the 1960s identified a remote forested site called Espíritu Pampa as the “lost city”, and Hemming, weighing up all the evidence over many expeditions, deemed this to be the real Vilcabamba (and for those yearning for details, I can only send them back to Hemming). Writer Colin Thubron thanks Hemming at the start of his travel-novel To the Last City (2002). Two couples, one British, the other Franco-Belgian and a doubting Spanish seminarian are led by a Peruvian mestizo guide, mules and horse to Vilcabamba (“he loved the sound of the name”). Robert is a journalist out to write the book he has been trying to write all his life, based on direct observation and sensations, on the mystery of the Incas. As he becomes more and more frustrated with his notes, the European trekkers visit the inaccessible Inca ruins of Choquequirau, abandoned, without history, its purpose unknown. They meet Quechua descendants, “who still walked these mountains in mournful amnesia.” Though they finally reach Vilcabamba after dramatic encounters with an Inca mummy and machete-wielding Indians, we discover that the lost or last city “lay underground like an abandoned cemetery” and that Vilcabamba is ultimately more an idea in the mind than a real place as it sinks into the jungle humus.

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The Inca trail

Chapter Three

Peru Nostalgia and Violence Che Guevara once alluded to his “Andean bones” as a way of asserting his deep-seated Latin American identity. He sensed that the mountains of Bolivia were the place from which to launch his dreamed-of continentwide revolution. Yet, perhaps inevitably, the Argentine came up against cultural and linguistic barriers (even though he tried to learn Quechua) which contributed to failure and death. Lack of communication with local people condemned his guerrilla campaign from the start. What Che encountered was the inscrutability and hostility that face so many outsiders. Far from the tourist centres of Machu Picchu and Cuzco are the small communities of the Peruvian Andes, often remote and harsh places. A recent article on gold in The National Geographic claims that La Rinconada, near Arequipa in Peru, is the highest town in the Andes. At 17,000 feet, it is home to some 30,000 miners, tunnelling for gold. It is a shanty town, the miners are Quechua speakers and they do not articulate or record their experiences. Few have managed to communicate the daily reality of communities such as these, and so few indigenous Andeans are writers that we have mostly to rely on outsider versions of such a reality. One exception is César Vallejo, who can truly have claimed to have Andean bones.

Santiago de Chuco: César Vallejo’s Andean Roots The great and idiosyncratic poet César Vallejo (1892-1938) published his first two collections of poems, Los heraldos negros (1918) and Trilce (1922) in Lima, Peru. But after spending 112 days in prison in Trujillo, he wanted to leave, avoid re-arrest and savour Paris, the cultural capital of Latin America at the time, where he lived, married, fought fascism and hardly published any poems. He died skinny and exhausted, without once having returned to Peru (he is buried in the Montparnasse cemetery). How Andean was his sensibility? Early Peruvian critics like the Marxist 35

“Frozen in time”: the Andean village

Nostalgia and Violence

sociologist José Carlos Mariátegui had no doubts about his debt to the Andes. Vallejo was, he wrote, the first in Peruvian literature to really express indigenous feelings. He pinpointed two factors: nostalgia through exile, and the “pessimism of the Indian”. In the poetry “pain is not personal” but racial. Both the poet’s personal suffering and the suffering of the poor and downtrodden are the underlying themes of all his work, lightened by poems about the disasters of falling and failing in love and much avantgarde black humour. Yet Vallejo was not Andean Indian despite his preInca Chimu ancestry, nor Quechua-speaking, but a mestizo. A pupil of his, the Peruvian novelist Ciro Alegría, said he spoke Spanish with a “shsh” sound, typical of Santiago de Chuco. He was born at 96 calle Colón in Santiago de Chuco (since renamed after him), and his birthplace is a museum. The town lies 10,217 feet above sea level and has steeply inclined streets. Both grandfathers, apparently, had been priests. Home was a typical Andean house in the centre of town, with courtyards and a poyo (a sort of bench in an alcove) that reappears in many poems. Vallejo never explains anything and refers simply to his home-town in poems about the end of childhood that allude to the blind church bell-ringer Santiago, his brother Miguel, games, huge family meals and his much older parents. He was the youngest of eleven children and lived in his village until he was thirteen. When he returned to Santiago for its fiestas in 1920, he was involved in a fire that burned down a business, with two policeman shot dead. He went on the run and hid for three months before being caught and imprisoned in what he called the “worst moment of my life”. Many of the poems from Trilce and some of his short stories emerge explicitly from his confinement in Trujillo, where he shared a cell with a murderer and a drunk, who hummed sad yaravíes. When his mother died in 1918 he was in Lima. Two years later he wrote a short story about a trip back home by horse along the “Camino Real” (or old Inca road) called “Beyond Life and Death”, published in 1923. But there was to be no mother awaiting her wandering, bohemian son. He meets his father and brothers at a remote farm in the montaña, a word for the tropical slopes of the eastern Andes. After seeing his village on its meseta (plateau) and the cemetery from afar, he arrives at night. In the poyo sits his sister. His vigil consists of walking around the “loved old mansion”, and it is the poyo that symbolizes life (the story closes with a ghostly encounter). 37

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So much so for his actual Andean town. But Vallejo also tried his hand at reviving the Inca world in poems and prose. His section of sarcastic poems “Imperial Nostalgias” ends with a lovely love poem, “Dead Idyll”, associating the end of his Inca reveries with that of his home-town love life. He writes: “What would she be doing now, my sweet Andean Rita/of rush and tawny berry:/now when Byzantium asphyxiates me” (here suggesting both sin and Lima). Rita is Andean because she evokes reeds and a local wild cherry, wears a flannel skirt and tastes of “homemade May rum”. Village life and loves and the distant capital Lima are centuries rather than miles apart. “Towards the Kingdom of the Sciris” appeared posthumously in 1944, and was possibly penned in Paris between 1924 and 1928. The title refers to the Kingdom of the Caras, also known as the Sciris, in Quito. The story opens with Inca forces returning home defeated, led by Huayna Capac. They enter Cuzco to war drums. Vallejo sought the exact Inca terms for the encounter between the general and his father the Emperor Tupac Yupanqui, and it makes for hard reading (you need a special Inca dictionary). The story catches the Inca Empire at a moment of weakness when the Inca wants peace, but witchdoctors predict that white foreigners with beards are on their way. Vallejo sets a scene in Sacsayhuamán with the great “tired stone”, imagines the great ritual slaughter of a hundred llamas and sketches a vague love story, but his interest peters out. I was left with a sense of how hard Vallejo had worked to find a precise vocabulary that made the Incas alien and not exotic. He set his single novel El tungsteno (Tungsten, 1931) in a copper mine in Quiruvilca in Santiago de Chuco province, some five hours by car from Trujillo today, and lying at 13,146 feet. The mine was first exploited in 1789, with silver seams worked in the 1870s. Titled after the mineral tungsten, of high melting point and used in filaments in lights, the novel deals with bitter conflicts in the mining town, where the voracious mines symbolize a classically Latin American collision between exploitation and tradition. Clearly a leftwing pot-boiler, it was written in 1930, when the capitalist West seemed about to implode. Writing from exile in Madrid, Vallejo creates a new working-class hero, a blacksmith called Servando Huanca, a “pure Indian, with salient cheek bones, copper-coloured, small sunken and brilliant eyes, straight black hair, of middling stature and with a withdrawn almost taciturn expression.” 38

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This “pure Indian” is the organizer of a revolt against the bosses (gamonales), who include the priest, the doctor, the judge and intellectuals, backed by US dollars. His listeners, the miners, are overcome by “the blacksmith’s clear and simple truths.” The novel is, of course, wish fulfilment and perhaps even a projection of Vallejo’s own rabble-rousing dreams, but it is also a diagnosis of Andean injustice. At one point Vallejo has his protagonist refer to a still-relevant issue: “Impunity is traditional and common in this province.” It might have made a better essay. Huanca, the indigenous proletarian opposed to westernizing attitudes, embodies the common view of Andean Indians as beyond interpretation. In the popular myth of the time they do not understand money and have no work ethic (embodied by the Sora Indians in the novel). This idea of the “taciturn” Indian as eluding western understanding cuts across the work of many writers from Lima. For example, José Santos Chocano’s poem “Who Knows?” depicts an “an Indian with a taciturn brow/and pupils without sparkle.” The poet asks: “What thought do you hide/in your enigmatic expression?” The Andean Indian, so the stereotype goes, is of an old race and an impenetrable heart, incapable of happiness and seeing pain without suffering. The Indian is in this poem “like the Andes”; what appears to city people to be vile indifference is “a wise indifference”. Vallejo’s best portrayal of his Andean roots is his tongue-in-cheek 1918 poem “Muleteers”, for mules were used as pack animals. He describes the muleteer of the title as “fabulously glazed in sweat”, working at the Menocucho hacienda, which treats him with its “thousand daily displeasures for life”. Up high the sun “hurts so much”, and he wears his red poncho, chewing coca leaves—mockingly phrased as “savouring the Peruvian romance of your coca.” Vallejo spies on this man from his hammock among the mosquitoes, observing that he will always be moving on with his donkey in the “occidental Andes of Eternity”. Yet he is somehow happy with his coca, his heat and his anxieties, which the poet lacks.

The Andes Imagined (1): Mario Vargas Llosa’s LITUMA EN LOS ANDES

Another glimpse into Andean mentality comes through the policeman Lituma, who began his literary life in Vargas Llosa’s La Casa verde (The Green House, 1966) and continues in the novel set in Piura, in the desert 39

THE ANDES

of northern Peru, ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? (Who killed Palomino Molero, 1986), reappearing with his underling in the bleak central Andes, sent there as punishment in Lituma en los Andes (Death in the Andes, 1993). It seems that the Arequipa-born Vargas Llosa, with nineteenthcentury Balzacian ambitions, is mapping a composite picture of Peru through novels set in Lima, on the coast, in the jungle and high up in the cordillera. Lituma is the “guardia” to a small Quechua-speaking community called Naccos as a road is built near an abandoned mine. (Vargas Llosa invents this name, as it derives from the Quechua nakaq meaning throatcutter.) Lituma tries to solve three disappearances and is made aware through chatting with the licentious bar owner and his witch of a wife of the many local superstitions. We also learn about the Maoist Sendero Luminoso guerrillas who kill village leaders, two French tourists on a bus and any white from Lima. Vargas Llosa’s Peruvian readers, of course, also come from Lima, and would only be willing to explore the Andean hinterland—“the mountains are hell”—through the armchair safety of a novel. The novelist creates figures like a Danish anthropologist who grasps everything intellectually and as a foreigner realizes that it is an error to try to understand the killings rationally “because there are no rational explanations.” Nobody can understand Peru, he says and “what cannot be deciphered” is the bait for people like him from clear and intelligible countries like Denmark. The Andean people “appear to come from another planet”; Lituma confesses: “They didn’t speak Spanish and we had to understand each other like deafmutes.” The sacrifices of an albino, an ex-mayor and a dumb animal lover are made to placate supernatural forces which the local people believe in, of which the main ones are apu, a pre-Columbian god of the mountain (the word was also an Inca term for a governor of one of the four regions), the muki, or devil, in the mines, and finally pishtakos, white-skinned people who hunt and kill Indians for their fat. Vargas Llosa at first thought that this last superstition has died out but discovered that the inhabitants of a slum in Ayacucho, capital of the province, had set up guards to protect themselves from pishtakos. Half-gringo and living in caves, these ghouls trap victims with powder from a dead man’s bones and suck out their fat to leave them empty, or drink all their blood like vampires and eat the 40

Nostalgia and Violence

flesh. Mary Weismantel adds that pishtakos are believed to be long-haired, to haunt lonely mountain roads and to pick on women. William Stein, studying the Andean community of Hualcán, was taken for a pishtako, a rapist, a transmitter of venereal disease and a castrator. Soon, prophesizes Vargas Llosa in the novel, the Andes will be left alone to the pishtakos and apus. His perception of the emptying of the Andes came from his 1990 campaigning for the Peruvian presidency when he travelled through the region in search of votes and support while Sendero Luminoso waged its war against whites. In “A Fish out of Water”, a memoir of his unsuccessful election campaign, he reveals that it was impossible to reach many Andean communities overland, so he flew in helicopters and small planes, landing in dangerous spots on mountain tops or in a village cemetery. Noting the scrawled Maoist slogans, he described Andean villagers “abandoning everything, driven half mad with desperation because of the violence and poverty” and swelling the shanty towns as if in some Biblical catastrophe. When a grieving peasant woman in Ayacucho hugged him, she “sobbed out words in Quechua that I couldn’t understand.”

The Andes Imagined (2): Ciro Alegría’s EL MUNDO ES ANCHO Y AJENO

An earlier and authentic insight into Andean conflicts is provided by Ciro Alegría’s novel El mundo es ancho y ajeno (Broad and Alien is the World, 1941). Rosendo Maqui is the mountain village elder in a community threatened by the greed and political ambitions of the local landowner during the 1910s and 1920s. He is a Spanish-speaking Indian, though the community accepts cholos (from mixed marriages of “whites” and “indios”). The surname Maqui (meaning “hand of stone” in Quechua) alludes to a real rebel called General Rumi Maqui, who was caught in 1915, put on trial in Arequipa as a traitor but then vanished to Bolivia and became a roaming figure of myth. The community’s hard but peaceful existence is based on growing highland produce like quinoa, potatoes and maize, as well as herding cattle and sheep. Rosendo tries to preserve the traditional way of life and the communal land through law, but he is swindled. This situation echoes the Inca clan or ayllu, with Rosendo as a modern kuraka or shaman. But unlike Inca times, everything has to be written down, and paper-work and lawyers 41

THE ANDES

are a “national evil”, claims Alegría. The novel sets up moments of hope only to dash them, ending with the arrival of the army and its Germanmade rifles to quell an Indian uprising. The widower Rosendo’s life and death illustrate an episode set around 1910 of an ongoing drama of abuse by the rich of the poor. El mundo es ancho y ajeno must have seemed fictionally archaic even when it was published and won a prize judged by Blair Niles and John Dos Passos. The world it brings to life is also archaic, especially to the city reader. The novel lacks conventional continuity and tells stories of a markedly oral flavour as it introduces “real” characters like Fiero Vázquez, with smallpox scars on his face, a bandit in black or Anselmo, the crippled harpist, while a narrator, Alegría himself, often enters the text to offer a comment. Like a film script, all camera shots of outer life and little introspection, it could be a Hollywood B movie—except that it preaches revolution, and would love to be read by the people it portrays, but they are illiterate. One of the villagers, Benito Castro, migrates to Lima, is taught to read and returns home. He might not grasp historical materialism or the Hegelian dialectic, but he values his freedom with his life, and will not be a slave in the rich man’s mine or a pongo, working for nothing. The title of the novel shrinks the wide world into the puna, with one chapter set in Lima. The tablelands are wide open and free according to Andean lore, but also alien, not “theirs” according to law. The “alien” of the title is not metaphysical but political. Yet landscape features actively in relation to the tough people depicted. Rosendo opens the novel collecting herbs recommended by the “witchdoctor”. He likes testing his strength with the steep slopes and dominating them. Then, as he fills “his eyes with horizon,” we read the following: He loved the ample spaces and the magnificent grandeur of the Andes. He contemplated them from one of Rumi’s slopes, a hill with a blue rock at the top, pointing to the sky. Rumi means stone and its slopes were indeed sown with blue almost black stones which seemed lunar between the yellow whistling bunches of grass. The Rumi “cerro” was both untamed and tame, full of gravity and goodness. The Indian Rosendo Maqui thought he understood its physical and spiritual secrets as his own.

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Through the Quechua words rumi and maqui Rosendo physically identifies with the Andes (though Alegría moved Rumi’s location; it lies south of Cajamarca in the La Libertad mountain range). The narrator pushes this organic link a few lines later: “the Indian Rosendo Maqui was crouching like an old idol. He had a knotty and sallow body like ‘lloque’— a twisted and very hard stick—because he was part vegetable, part man, part stone.” When he speaks, Alegría gives him corrupted Spanish, which must be read aloud to catch its flavour. (In interviews he stressed that his characters spoke Spanish, not Quechua.) Rosendo is thus from the mountains. The Indians constantly chew a “ball of coca leaves”, they live in adobe houses with rush roofs and eat from mates or gourds. We learn about their clinging to traditions like the chacho, a spirit that lives in stone ruins and is small and black, with a face like an old potato. They are hard, resistant to innovation, and are “obscurely pigheaded”. (That last telling phrase is a compliment.) Most of all, they are silent compared to the chattering lawyers and hacienda boss— and us readers. It is the puna grass, the “whistling ichu grass”, that the Indians hear, for wind defines their hard lives. They farm “the wide tableland, dotted with high grass and nervous rocks, beaten by a stubborn wind that cuts into them, and it’s cold despite the sun that falls from the sky that seems very close to them.” As the photographer Pablo Corral Vega, living in Quito, said: “The true lord of the Andes is the wind.” Landscape and climate contribute to the “Andean pain”. Alegría’s imagined community sleeps rough and accepts prison-like conditions as if still quietly suffering the Inca rejection of comfort. These comuneros are forced to abandon their village, and do so with resignation, carting their meagre belongings on their backs to a new, hostile site. This moment in the novel suggest an Andean archetype of the forced rehabilitation suffered by the Kulaks in Stalin’s Russia. The Indians emerge from the novel as migrant workers, as homeless, as nomads in their own lands. The novel, Ciro Alegría’s third and last, ends pessimistically with the din of Mausers—in 1941 Hitler appeared to be winning the European war just as fascism was on the rise in Latin America, and the sound of rifle shots threatens the villagers. Mario Vargas Llosa thought that the book inaugurated Peruvian fiction with its testimonial actuality, for the Indian problem “still exists.” Alegría was born in the Andes in 1909 on a hacienda in Sartibamba 43

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in Huamachuco province. It took him seven days by horse to zigzag through the mountains to reach his school in Trujillo on the coast after the wind and sun had burned his face and hands. There he was taught by the rebel poet César Vallejo, with his long black locks. Vallejo, as we have seen, was also Andean, his “mind full of deep ravines”. Alegría knew early that he wanted to be a writer (stimulated by Enrique López Abújar’s Cuentos andinos and then by Mariátegui’s magazine Amauta) and began as a journalist. He suffered for his militant activism with torture and prison in Trujillo for seven months in 1932 and later a year in prison in Lima. The political party that he joined in 1930, the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA), had been founded in 1924 by Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre and linked the Inca communal structure—the ayllu— with socialism, but rejected Moscow’s domination. Haya de la Torre, who believed that the future for indigenous Peru lay in modernization, also endured prison and exile for his non-violent tactics, which included hunger strikes and literacy programmes. He travelled round Peru and coined the term Indoamérica for his envisioned future. Alegría was finally deported in 1934 as a troublesome aprista to Chile where he wrote El mundo es ancho y ajeno (he did not return to Peru until 1957 and then as a visitor, but settled finally in Chaclacayo, where he died). The still readable novel was translated into countless languages. Strangely, he did not visit Cuzco, the “psychological capital of Peru”, until the late 1950s before he died in 1967. A real-life incident from 1983 was narrated by Vargas Llosa himself and concerns the assassination of a group of eight journalists who had taken a taxi to Huaychao, 12,000 feet up in Huanta province. They were investigating whether Indian peasants, like those in Alegría’s novel, had captured seven guerrillas from Sendero Luminoso and shot them, or whether they had been killed by army special forces, nicknamed the sinchi. Vargas Llosa describes the highland peasants as living in “some twenty scattered peasant communities… populated by a single ethnic group, the Iquichans: their lands are poor, their isolation is almost absolute, and their customs are archaic.” This was Alegría and Quechua-speaking country, inhabited by people who still believe in apus. The comuneros had begun to fight back against the guerrillas, killing many more of them. They were holding a council when the journalists arrived (an open council is held in Alegría’s novel). They took the journalists for terrorists and killed them 44

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with slingshots, sticks and knives. They were then buried face down as devils and their ankles broken so that they could not return. Vargas Llosa was part of the commission formed to find out how they died, and only by unearthing a camera with a reel inside could they piece the incident together. Che Guevera died in Bolivia in much the same way in 1967, because he could not speak the language and was not a peasant.

Cajabamba In 1920 Ciro Alegría went to school for a year in the Andean town of Cajabamba. It lies under the Cerro Chochoconday near a lagoon called Yahuarcocha, meaning “blood lake” due to a story recounting that the Incas cut the throats of a whole village and threw the bodies in the water. The indigenista painter José Sabogal (1888-1956) came from this whitewashed, red-tiled town. Alegría subsequently claimed that he rediscovered Peru through his paintings, and he, too, was struck by the colours, the ravines and the water canals. Sabogal’s house was far from poor, boasting an inner patio. The boy Ciro went to look at his paintings, including some of gauchos, for Sabogal had studied art in Argentina. But what Ciro loved most was to climb mountains, especially Manancancho, the highest, with its bluish crags where snow sometimes settled, Muere, with its razor sharp peaks, the Cerro Blanco, Huayrapiruro, packed with fossils, and snowcovered Huaylillas, where from horseback he saw the Cordillera Blanca in the distance. Alegría, like his character Rosendo Maqui, felt that contemplating the Andes was to enter a state of eternity. Later, during a brief avant-garde phase, he would play with the letter A of “Andes” as if it was a peak itself. In the early 1980s Dervla Murphy, her nine-year-old daughter Rachel and a donkey walked 1,300 miles from Cajamarca to Cuzco. They gazed down from the Camino Real on Cajabamba’s “old russet roofs” and the town seemed “tranquil and timeless” amidst its groves of eucalyptus. Quechua We have seen that one of the barriers to outsiders in the Andes is language. As is well documented, the Incas had no writing and used knots on quipus to record and calculate (see p.104). The spoken imperial language, forced on all vassals, was Quechua, originating among the Quechua people of the Apurímac valley and officially made the state language in 1438. It was 45

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a lingua franca, as the young of nobles around the empire were obliged to go to Cuzco and learn the language. Prescott called it “the beautiful Quechua dialect” (but did not speak it). The chronicler Zárate found it guttural and explained how the Incas converted it into the lingua franca. Thus the elites spoke the same language all over the empire and could dispense with interpreters. The Inca Garcilaso suggested that Spaniards should also learn the “general language of Cuzco”, as it was easy to pick up within two months and would lead to better government and communications, rather than the confusion of tongues of post-conquest Peru. The earliest Quechua/Spanish dictionaries were written, according to Hemming, to aid missionaries. The best was by Diego González Holguin in 1607. For long periods missionaries preached in Quechua in order to capture Andean souls. In 1887 Clorinda Matto de Turner wrote a long essay “El Qqechua”, highlighting its poetic qualities, especially its onomatopoeia, and deploring limeño ignorance of “our mother tongue”. Quechua, she thought, should again be the language unifying the nation. Indeed, the constitution that followed General San Martín’s liberation of Peru from the Spaniards stated that it was a bilingual country. J. Alden Mason saw this language and its dialects as the direct link to the Incas, as it has changed little since their time. It is not Indo-European, has a complex rule-based grammar, and yet its flaw is its lack of an alphabet. Only isolated words have passed into other languages: llama, condor, guanaco, puma, coca, pampa, quinine, guano and charqui. In the 1970s, as Ronald Wright has shown, there was an attempt to re-baptize Quechua as runasimi, meaning the “language of the people”. (Wright used the word runa as it was the way Andeans address themselves, instead of the pejorative indio, to avoid falling into any language traps in racist Peru.) This re-branding went with new spelling: Inka for Inca; Atau Wallpa for Atahualpa, etc. However, because many of my witnesses to the Andes used the earlier conventions, I will leave them as Quechua. A character in Ciro Alegría’s El mundo es ancho y ajeno learns Quechua, which “sounded at times like the fierce wind and other times like water running underground.” Alegría gives a good sense of where Quechua persists as a language in his description of the maize harvest. The harvesters break open the outer parca (husk) with their fingernails, to reveal the glistening red, mauve, white and yellow mazorcas. These are then taken to the 46

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cauro, made of cactus, in an operation called the mucura so the sun can dry the maize’s anotas and so on. Quechua might be losing ground to Spanish, he notes, but certainly not in ancient agrarian rituals where it is “tenderly defended”, as these Quechua words are rooted in the men themselves. The Ecuadorian novelist Jorge Icaza described the sound of Quechua as a “murmullo bisbiseante” (whispering mumble), since any language you do not know still has a sound. In a survey cited by Peter Cole et al in 1981, eleven per cent of the Peruvian population were monolingually Quechua, whereas in 1940 it had been thirty-one per cent. In Ayacucho province in 1961, however, 95 per cent were either mono- or bilingually Quechua speakers, so it depends on the region. José María Arguedas was acutely aware of the language barrier in Peru as he was bilingual. He published translations of Quechua songs as Canto Kechwa in 1938, expanding the collection in 1949. In his fiction he tried to use Quechua syntax but in Spanish, to give a sense of the absence of articles, pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions (it is an inflected language) and withheld verbs. The critic William Rowe claimed that this gives only an “impression of Indian thought”. The chapter titled “Zumbayllu” in Arguedas’ novel Los ríos profundos is a little treatise on Quechua. First he stresses its onomatopoeic note with the ending -yllu that sounds like buzzing flies (another -yllu noun is tankayllu, a horsefly that does not bite). Arguedas also mentions the pinkuyllu, a giant quena or flute, and explains how its sounds reach into the darkest areas of the human heart. Manuel Scorza noted the Quechua belief about the sound sio, called chiririnka, the sound of the blue fly of death, as the soul leaves the corpse. These Quechua sounds tap into ancient Peruvian links between blood and matter. Patrick Symmes found himself stuck with his motorbike, on a collapsed road in Andean Peru. As three women laughed and spoke to him in Quechua, he observed how in their bowler hats, sweaters, skirts, several petticoats and bare feet they had survived “from an ancient time”. He gave them some rice, and they asked for his wristwatch. For him these Quechua-speakers were “the most pure example of untrammelled indigenous life I have ever seen,” a far cry from the “deadly anomie” of Lima’s shanty towns or the “psychotic alienation” that nurtured Sendero Luminoso. They live in their own time and speak their own language, which he, like me, though good Spanish-speakers, cannot grasp. Ronald Wright 47

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remedied this ignorance by learning Quechua as he travelled around Peru. He realized that runasimi was not Indo-European, that it had an agglutinate grammatical structure and a “formidable array of suffixes”—up to 12,000 modifications can be appended to any noun. There is also a Quechua flag with horizontal colours, starting with red at the top, representing this language community.

The Andes Imagined (3): Manuel Scorza’s LA GUERRA SILENCIOSA

Like Ciro Alegría, Manuel Scorza (1928-83) was an aprista who fought for Indian land rights, and was forced into exile in Paris in 1968, where he wrote the first of his five-novel cycle titled La Guerra silenciosa (completed in 1979). In a note to the first volume, Redoble por Rancas, he insists that this novel is an exasperatingly real chronicle of events that took place between 1950 and 1962, high up in the pampa of Junín. He updates Ciro Alegría by taking another narrative route, opting for the mock epic. His Indian characters are given qualities absent in the bosses. One, Héctor Chacón, can see in the dark, another reads other people’s dreams, another talks to horses. Though they are defeated, their spirits still live (in his novels). Many of the names are of real people, as Scorza’s ploy is to take gossip as the source of all knowledge. His characters do not read and understand the world intellectually, but through hearsay. It is how Gabriel García Márquez conceived of the writer and how Miguel Angel Asturias focused on his Mayan peasants. The reader enters this uncertain, unverifiable, scandal-mongering world as just another eavesdropper. The novel is grounded in three towns or villages. Rancas in the interminable Junín pampa is cursed by strangers and lorry drivers who haul fruit over its high passes from Tingo María to Lima, attacked by soroche. Because of the peaks warm sun lasts only a few hours at midday. This village, which will no longer exist at the end of the novel for its people will be “evicted”—hence the drum rolls of the title—does not trust strangers. Nobody would dream of visiting its “plaza de armas”, as this is the “arsehole of the world” where nothing ever happens. Indeed, Scorza holds the view that Peru is a series of villages “frozen in time”. The second town is the mining centre, Cerro de Pasco. According to the Swiss naturalist Johann Jacob von Tschudi, Cerro de Pasco once vied with Potosí for its silver, much of it smuggled out. In the 1840s the town 48

Life among the desolation of the pampa

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was the largest in Peru and life was extremely hard under the winds and snow. The geological veins ran out in 1900, but an American found more silver and revived the mine, turning it into a multinational company with more power than God. Scorza’s novel opens with a press cutting about the Cerro de Pasco Mining Corporation, which exploits the highland mines and accrues vast profits. The mines poison the lakes and village; there are no longer fat trout in the streams. The highest town in the world, too high for trees or flowers, it is the roof of the world, but offers no escape, no way back. There is only occasional sun, otherwise a freezing wind born in caves that “rancorously licks the bare earth.” Its pass is watched over by two “impassable mountains”, inaccessible even to birds. Scorza’s Cerro de Pasco is pure desolation, a hell where only tough icchu grass grows, a symbol for how tough Andeans cling to the soil. The mining company starts to fence in the land. We see this cerco from the Andean point of view as it seems to erect itself, first circling the bare Huiska hill, then surrounding the Cerro Huancacala, cutting roads and dividing rivers so that the locals can no longer put their sheep out to pasture and they start dying. The barbed wire fence, the devil’s work, is like a giant jaw gobbling up land. The pampa was communal land; the community has deeds to prove ownership going back to the Audiencia de Tarma of 1784. When the character Chacón plants potatoes in an abandoned field after clearing it, cattle are sent to trample his plants for the land is no longer his. Soon this fence, we are led to believe, will enclose the whole world. The third town is Yanahuanca, where the judge and landowner Dr. Montenegro lives. He is first described in a black suit out on his routine stroll, and such is his power that when he drops a coin, a sol, nobody dares pick it up and it becomes a popular sight until he himself finds and pockets it. This man owns the great hacienda named Huarautambo, is protected by a gang of thugs and is “myopic” concerning his workers. He is the villain of the novel, the man whom Chacón vows to kill. Yet rumour has it that the judge can read the peasants’ minds (in fact, he has informers). Nobody can compete with him as he plays interminable poker games with other landowners or gamonales. We learn that when fifteen villagers go to see one of these bosses to complain, he invites them to a meal and poisons them, claiming it was a collective heart attack. When one of Montenegro’s 50

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thugs is killed by Chacón, Montenegro has the corpse pelted with rocks so that he can accuse the whole village council of the murder. The townspeople believe that “if you sleep, if you walk, the hacienda boss knows everything.” Animals warn him, dogs pass on secret information. Although this novel is placed in the late 1950s, the highland Andeans are still seen as savages who do not wear shoes or sleep in beds, who fantasize, cook with dung, are violent and concoct weird forms of revenge (they let pigs into the fenced off fields to poison the grass, but all are shot dead). A traveller says of them that they do nothing but complain, cheat and lie; he calls them the cancer that is rotting Peru. But these Andean people have heard of the revolutionary activist Hugo Blanco and strive to form a union, only to be sent packing by soldiers. Scorza is conscious of history’s ironies for Bolívar had passed through Rancas on the eve of the famous Battle of Junín against the Spaniards some 500,000 days before. He had stood for Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood but the Andeans only received Infantry, Cavalry and Artillery. Peru had fought eleven wars since Bolívar granted the nation freedom from Spain and lost most of them; the army had turned on the indigenous Andean population in 1924, massacring 4,000 in Huancare. The army caste is the enemy, suggests Scorza, and at the end of the novel all the insurgents are killed by the troops of Colonel Marruecos, later a general. The novel closes with the dead talking to each other from their tombs— as in Pedro Páramo, the Mexican Juan Rulfo’s great novel about a cacique and the talking dead. The novel’s subtitle, “What Happened Ten Years Before Colonel Marruecos founded Chinche’s Second Cemetery”, suggests that killing Indians and founding cemeteries is in essence the history of the Andes. In an interview with Tomás Escajadillo, Scorza reckoned that on average there had been sixty uprisings a year since the conquest, and all ended with escarmiento (punishment), a word, Arguedas wrote, that “freezes our blood.” Scorza himself felt that his novels had become history, expressing the struggle of the Rancas indios. In June 1983 the wife of the judge in his novel—he did not change any names—was kidnapped by Sendero Luminoso and executed in the plaza in Yanahuanca. Earlier, General Francisco Morales Bermúdez had pledged agrarian reform while visiting Rancas in 1975. Scorza had become secretary to the Movimiento Comunal de Perú and was exiled a second time. Sadly he died in a plane crash in Madrid, on 51

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his way to a conference in Bogotá, along with Angel Rama, Marta Traba and the Mexican writer Jorge Ibarguenoitía. Had he lived, he would have seen that Andean land rights were still an issue in 2009.

Quena (Qena) and Music Perhaps Andean music and dance, its corollary, offer an even quicker way than fiction into the highland mind, but they are hard to evoke through the written word. Everybody can identify sad Peruvian (or is it Bolivian?) music, with its quenas, charangos and drums or wind and percussion. I’ve seen ponchoed groups of Andean musicians playing in the market in Tonsberg, Norway, in Brighton and on a plaza in Alicante. The sadness of this music is both haunting and close to kitsch. The Peruvian José Santos Chocano, who wanted to be the Poet of the Americas, titled a poem “The Quena” and differentiated it from the Greek gods’ pipe, likening the Andean wind instrument to “a flute like a dove in death agony”. Hearing these flutes, we might all react like Robert, the frustrated writer in Colin Thubron’s novel To the Last City, who hears a quena’s heart-rending and “breathy” music. He interprets this unique sound as “lamenting everything lost, and perhaps forgotten, by these orphaned people: a plangent leftover severed from its origins.” Ciro Alegría tells how one of his Andean peasants becomes a musician, when most active men are forced to till the ground. Anselmo’s father is a cheese-maker, but he wants to plough. He then falls ill and his legs wither. One day he hears musicians at a fiesta playing zampoñas (the famous panpipes) and a desire to play awakens in him. He asks his father for an Andean harp, without pedals, modified from its Spanish origins into a simpler version to express the Andean “deep affliction”. (J. Alden Mason pointed out that stringed instruments were unknown in the Americas, so the harp was adapted from European instruments.) Music then compensates him for being a cripple. When he plays the triangular instrument on his bench, feet tucked under his poncho, “the world was beautiful and wide and fecund.” Music is “Andean man’s preferred art” until the local boss forces the community from its home and Anselmo can no longer play: “Where was the land to sing about? There was nothing but stones, cold and silence.” He soon dies. There is no longer time for art. The quena, sometimes made from reeds or bones, even human ones, best represents the melancholic Andean sound, writes Alegría: “And one 52

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night a quena sounded. Nostalgia wept a long, heart-rending music.” There are many types of quena. Arguedas described the largest, made from clay, called the pinkuyllu, an epic form of the instrument. Another is the mámak, which means “mother”, made from a tropical reed. Music was traditionally played for dancing and what von Hagen calls “ritual drunkenness”, where repeated sounds induced a “collective hypnotism”. The Incas also used the potóto, adapted from conch shells, a monotonous form of trumpet. They also shook tambourines, attached copper and silver bells to their clothes or to sticks and played small five-string guitars called charangos. To most tourists’ ears today, it is the antara, or panpipes of cane or pottery, that make the softest, saddest sounds. And there were songs, like the yaraví or harawi, a lament derived from Inca court music. César Vallejo’s first sonnet in his “Terceto autóctono” announces a fiesta where “In indigenous veins gleams/a yaraví of blood filtered/through pupils into nostalgias of sun,” hinting at sun-worship and nostalgia for an earlier way of life that was Incaic. In another poem “Village Scene”, Vallejo conjures up “the decrepit village/rends a guitar’s sweet yaraví/in whose eternity of deep affliction/the sad voice of an Indian dronedongs [dondonea]/like a big, old cemetery bell.” That expression “deep affliction”, we saw, occurred in Alegría’s novel to capture the Indian’s perceived inner sadness; he clearly stole it from this poem by Vallejo, who had also been his school teacher in Trujillo. The song itself is a sound taking the listener back beyond time. Another version of the yaraví is the huayno, also connected to the Inca past. Ernesto, in Arguedas’ Los ríos profundos, observes how his father can tell from which Andean village each huayno originates and arrives in a village and calls for the local musicians. He sits in an adobe hut with earth floor and listens to harpists: “The Indian harpist plays with his eyes closed. The harpist’s voice seems to rise up from the darkness inside the instrument and the charango formed a whirlwind that prints the words and music of the songs in memory.” Oral memory is what keeps the Andean Indian past alive; listening to music is to remember. Later in the same novel Ernesto concentrates on a harpist and violinist, “the typical orchestra of the villages”. As the harpist plays Ernesto visualizes from his memory “the high-up villages in the transparent air”. We then read these Quechua songs in bilingual versions in the novel. The huayno is about loss, life and suffering “en la pampa de Utari”. The melody of a song about a river in 53

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Paraisancos enters the boy’s heart and we touch the novel’s title—deep rivers—for it is here that delicate flowers blossom in the dangerous torrents. The boy confesses: “With music like this, man can cry until he dies.” The purging of suffering engenders a tough tenderness and real understanding. When another man plays the harp he is metamorphosed and his eyes become those of a hawk and his look “that contagious rapture” that penetrates the light and shadows of the world. As with all real art, Ernesto discovers how the huayno song and dance lure him into “the unknown”. William Stein, who acknowledged José María Arguedas in his study of Hualcán, observed that every hut had some musical instrument that could be played; professionals were paid only at fiestas. He listed five kinds of flute made from the sauco with easily hollowed out pith and observed that the pinkuyllu can also be made of a condor’s bone. The largest wind instrument was the “roncadora” (meaning “snorer” in Spanish), about two and a half feet long, with three holes. He also counted five kinds of percussion instruments of thin hide stretched over maguey wood sides. He found rattles, violins and a few mandolins. They were played spontaneously at dawn or nightfall—“the only leisure periods during the ordinary day.”

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Chapter Four

Peru Arequipa and the Cordilleras Arequipa, whose name in Quechua means “behind the hill”, is surrounded by Andean peaks. The poet Santos Chocano titled a poem “White City (Vision of Arequipa)” and likened the three volcanoes circling the city to “guardians”, or enchanted vestal virgins or the three camels of the Three Kings—all fancifully inexact comparisons. The most famous of them is Misti at 19,101 feet, a perfect volcanic cone scored by terraces (it means “white”). Matthew Parris calls it “bleakly geometrical”, while John Hopkins thought of it as “brooding” over the city. It spews ash and gas, not lava. Carleton Beals compared the way Misti looms over the city to how Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl dominate Mexico City, “except that Misti is closer.” The perfect and beautiful cone has become a scapegoat for Arequipans, who blame it for everything, even their bad moods. Also visible are Pichu-Pichu at 18,594 feet and Chachani at 19,994, the highest. The whole city is shaped by the proximity of volcanoes and fears of earthquakes and eruptions, from the low colonial churches to the white volcanic sillar stones used in the older houses that led to the label of “Arequipa la blanca”. Mario Vargas Llosa’s birthplace, Arequipa is famous for its jurists, crayfish and what he calls the nevada, a passing mood of badtemper. He also claims that Arequipans speak the best Spanish in Latin America. The main plaza, with colonnades, has lovely jacaranda trees, and the city is home to the enormous sixteenth-century Santa Catalina enclosed convent. Vargas Llosa had a distant relation who entered at the age of twelve and died still inside at the age of 89. She could only talk to her family through bars on a door. In 1970 the convent opened its doors to the public. An early visitor with a sharp eye for detail was the novelist Nicholas Shakespeare. He decided that it was “the colonial equivalent of Machu Picchu”, in reality a ghetto with its own streets, houses and cloisters. Patrick Leigh Fermor found that its “miles of high, forbidding, snowwhite walls” make it a “city within a city”. Shakespeare wrote in 1985: 55

Arequipa: city of convents

Arequipa and the Cordilleras

Between their arches frescoes painted with vegetable dyes and rabbits’ blood depict the stages of the soul in sin. On entering the convent, before a purgative eighteen months of solitary confinement, a novice would plant a fruit tree in the cemetery. On leaving the world she was buried under it.

It had not changed much since the 1830s, when the radical feminist Flora Tristan was in town, quite simply because it had excluded the outer world. Tristan had a Peruvian father from Arequipa, and, though illegitimate, bravely travelled out from Lorient, France, to claim her inheritance. In 1838 she published her travel account as Pérégrinations d’une paria. She arrived by horse at night in 1834 to her late father’s sillar-built town house on Calle Santo Domingo, where a large patio was lit by resin torches. She had been so sunburnt that she did not want to show herself. She was such an acute observer that whatever she wrote about is still clear and imaginable. But she was also independent and passionate, and a rebel. Tristan’s synopsis of the town’s history begins with the legend that Maita-Capae (she gets Inca names wrong), driven into exile, found himself at the foot of a volcano. In a fit of inspiration, he plunged his spear into the ground and yelled “Arequipa”, which in Quechua means “Here I stop.” He was standing in a tiny valley of “ravishing” beauty, watered by the “Chile” river. At Tristan’s time this volcano (now Misti) had no name, but she describes the first person to climb it as a cousin by marriage, Baron d’Althaus, who had arrived in Arequipa in 1825 as a member of Bolívar’s staff. He settled there and climbed the volcano, visiting its crater and taking notes. He took ten Indians with him, but three dropped out and two dropped down and were killed. It took them three days, and he withstood the summit for only a few hours due to the freezing cold. Tristan also chronicled everyday life for the well-off, comprising constant church going, religious theatre, copious meals and house-visits. Nineteenth-century Arequipa was a city of convents. She stayed in the famous enclosed convents of Santa Catalina and Santa Rosa, but they could not have been more different. Santa Rosa was austere, with forty-foot high walls to keep the “buried alive” inside. The cells had an oak table, a stool, an earthenware jug and a pewter goblet. There was a crucifix on the wall with a tortured Christ, a death’s head, an hourglass and perhaps a book on a side table. On a hook hung the scourge made of black leather. The nuns 57

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actually slept in dormitories, on beds nicknamed “tombs”. The whole place was “so dismal that it is difficult to repress a shudder of fear.” The Carmelite Order is based on vows of poverty and silence, but she noted that “evil-speaking, lying and slandering predominate.” In the Santa Catalina, the convent Vargas Llosa referred to and where she stayed six days, the nuns brought in their slaves, ate well, chatted, embroidered and tended the gardens, with plenty of leisure for doing what they liked. Tristan also observed how Arequipans loved food, but she found it “detestable”. The main dish was a puchero or stew made of beef, fat pork and mutton all boiled with rice and countless vegetables and fruit, a “barbarous concoction… as offensive as an orchestra playing out of tune.” This was followed by crayfish mixed with raw onions and eggs and then a salad. The whole ensemble was repeated for dinner. She also found the climate unhealthy, and blamed the altitude, for headaches, dysentery, nervous complaints and colds were very common. She added that the “inhabitants also suffer from the delusion that they are always ill.” Was this Vargas Llosa’s nevada? In fact, Tristan’s conclusion after eight months was that life in Arequipa “is extremely boring”—and that despite the fact that she had witnessed a gory factional battle for power from the rooftop. She did not receive her inheritance, and when her book reached Arequipa it was burnt in the public square. Flora Tristan was later to be the painter Paul Gauguin’s grandmother, and a protagonist in Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel about both of them, El paraíso en la otra esquina (The Way to Paradise, 2003). The American-born novelist John Hopkins wrote In the Chinese Mountains: a Novel of Peru (1990), a geographically exact novel set in Arequipa and on the railway to Cuzco, with a dramatic stop at Laguna Lagunillas, and a fictional Reina Victoria hotel that displays a plaque stating that the disappeared explorer Colonel Fawcett once stayed. The plot involves the wealthy Calderón family, an adopted mestizo narrator, a thinly disguised guerrilla leader Abimael Guzmán and explanations of Peruvian life, from the ever-waiting Indians to inflation and chicha. The title refers to the Maoist-inspired Sendero Luminoso, and to the origin of the Andean Indians: “They’re the true Peruvians—illiterate, half-starved, speaking only the Quechua tongue.” Perhaps the most amusing literary version of Arequipa comes from the poet Alberto Hidalgo (1897-1967). He was born there and migrated 58

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to Buenos Aires in 1920 as an avant-garde poet. There he founded his own movement called “simplismo” and the Revista Oral where poets (including Borges) spoke their poems through megaphones in a café. He praised Lenin and revelled in insulting his enemies. For him Arequipa was a staid city where “nobody has dared put his hand up her skirt.” When there is an earthquake, he wrote, breasts and candles tremble. He, the revolutionary poet, was a “current of scandal”, a wind that shuts windows in a city with a “transparency of sound”.

Mount Coropuna Hiram Bingham’s claim to fame is the discovery of Machu Picchu, but he was also a mountain-climber. In 1911 he reached Arequipa, in a bid to scale Mount Coropuna, meaning in Quechua “cut off at the top” and “cold, snowy heights”. At the time it was guessed to be perhaps the highest peak in the Americas. The team squabbled with muleteers and crossed a volcanic desert with Coropuna “glistening” seventy-five miles off. Bingham admitted that “no one knew anything about the mountain” except its fame as the devil’s abode. The peak ate people up, said a local Indian woman. The traveller Raimondi had found in 1865 that locals still left idols on its slopes. One Indian even said that at its summit was a paradise of fruit, butterflies and monkeys. As they approached Bingham confessed his real reason for the expedition was not scientific but the dream of conquering a “virgin peak”. Climbing up to 20,000 feet, the small party suffered soroche in the form of loss of appetite and whooping cough. All they craved was sweet tea. On the top of its dome at 21,703 feet they realized they were lower than Aconcagua (in fact, they stood on the nineteenth highest point in the Andes). The view was desolate, with not an atom of green anywhere. Their faces were burned, their lips painfully swollen as they slid down, abandoning most of their equipment. It was another extinct volcano. The Colca Valley Surrounded by great volcanoes, Misti, Chachani, Pichu-Pichu, Ampato and Ubinas, lies the Colca valley, one of the marvels of Peru according to Vargas Llosa. It is near Arequipa, but the way down to it used to involve a mule trek over high passes and mesetas. Now there is a road. The whole history of Peruvian man is condensed in the valley, Vargas Llosa claimed. 59

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There are caves with petroglyph drawings of foxes, stars and llamas and countless remains of Collagua and then Inca culture. The steep hills are carved with terraces. When the Spanish arrived in 1540, they forced the communities into fourteen villages, but they remained almost completely isolated. One of them is called Maca (the name of an allegedly magic herb). They seem close to each other, but this is a mirage probably caused by altitude. The valley ends with a canyon (twice as deep as the Grand Canyon), and condors flying high. Vargas Llosa met three foreign nuns who had learnt Quechua and were living and working there, one from the Bronx. The beauty of this once sealed-off valley, like the lost valleys that H. G. Wells fantasized about as the Country of the Blind, is the polar opposite of Lima la horrible.

Chambi’s Andes Martín Chambi was a cuzqueño who in perhaps thirty thousand photographs recorded his native town and its people. He hardly travelled out of the Andes. According to Vargas Llosa, this peasant from Coaza, who began working in a mine while still a child, turned photography from a skill into an art. He picked up all he knew in Arequipa and worked in Cuzco from the early 1920s until his death in 1973. He “stripped bare” the local classes, from feudal Indians to besuited dignitaries, but he was then forgotten. His black and white views are serious, sad and strangely tender. Amanda Hopkinson arrived in Cuzco to research Chambi and met his granddaughter as she was moving the seventy-five-year-old studio on Calle Márquez to a new address. She was allowed to glance through some of the boxes. Chambi was devout, made prayer cards to Taytacha, the Black Christ in Cuzco’s cathedral, El Señor de los Temblores, and photographed countless first communions, weddings and funerals. He was at home with arranged studio shots as much as with outdoors ones. He spoke Quechua and photographed his people without irony or superiority. He once said in a talk: “I am a delegate on behalf of my race; this is what speaks through my photos.” As Vargas Llosa predicted, it would be foreigners like Amanda Hopkinson who would begin the work to establish Chambi as a great photographer. The Andean world might vanish if his photos did not exist.

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Ayacucho and the Shining Path This department capital was founded by Francisco Pizarro in 1539 as a fort against Inca raids from Vilcashuamán nearby (and largely unexcavated, according to Hemming). It lies at some 9,200 feet, with a lovely mild climate. The city was planned like all New World towns in a grid system with its central plaza, cathedral, city hall and so on. The horse-back traveller Tschiffely claimed its name derived from the Quechua for “corner of the dead”. It was originally called Huamanga (or Guamanga)—in Quechua “there goes a falcon” or “hill of condors”—and marked the boundary between the Incas and hostile tribes. The Spanish changed its name to San Juan de la Frontera, and built the first, still-standing, church in South America there (it now has thirty-six more churches, several locked up). It lies on the road from Lima to Cuzco. The city is famous for the 1824 Battle of Ayacucho against the Spanish in nearby La Quinua, where Peru was finally liberated. The battle was so famous that it gave its name to a central street in Buenos Aires. The railroad from Lima, which stops at Huancayo and was built by a US engineer, Henry Meiggs, with guano boom money, was the highest standard gauge line in the world, reaching 16,000 feet. It also has a more sinister notoriety, for it was at its university in Huamanga that Abimael Guzmán, chief ideologist of the guerrilla Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), with a thesis on Kant, taught as a philosophy professor. Sendero Luminoso hit the headlines in Peru in 1980 when dogs were hung from lampposts in Lima wearing placards accusing Deng Xiaoping of betraying the Chinese Revolution. Guzmán, its fanatical leader, was born in the coastal port of Mollendo in 1934. He moved to Ayacucho, where conditions in the town and district were disastrous with high unemployment, infant mortality and illiteracy. He joined the Communist Party and then became a Maoist, visiting China three times. In 1970 he founded Sendero Luminoso, adopting a line from the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui about the “shining path to revolution”. According to Nicholas Shakespeare, the journalist Mariátegui was a “morose cripple with a falsetto voice”, but such hostility is unnecessary as he had to have a leg amputated, and, frail, died when only thirty-six years old. The irony was that he left Lima to spend nearly four years in Europe, was barely intimate with the Andes, yet preached “agrarian communism”. His legacy was the Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana 62

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(Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality, 1928), a sensitive Gramscian analysis, with a perceptive essay on the oft-cited Andean poet César Vallejo. For Abimael Guzmán, inspired by Mariátegui, Peru had remained semi-feudal, especially in the Quechua-speaking Andes. This indigenous area was denigrated by people from Lima as “the Indian stain” (on Peru’s body-politic). For a while, as Vargas Llosa noted, the government ignored what was happening in the sierra, burying its head in the coastal sand. The guerrillas were extremely successful, with over 2,900 operations by August 1982, usually targeting police and power stations, schools and small farms. Civil authority in Ayacucho collapsed. By the middle of 1982, Ayacucho was a liberated zone. Nicholas Shakespeare became, as both journalist and novelist, an expert witness to Sendero Luminoso. In 1988 he wrote journalistically about his quest to uncover the then reclusive Guzmán (since 1992 he has been on the prison island of San Lorenzo off Lima, as there is no death penalty in Peru). One of the myths that Sendero resuscitated was that of the pishtako, but it was appropriately politicized to include any tall, whitefaced foreigners (like Shakespeare himself ). A university lecturer told him that the pishtako had been invented by the Indians to refer to the Spanish, so it has a long history. Shakespeare talked to a man with a Coca-Cola baseball cap who told him that pishtakos had recently hacked off the limbs of 30,000 Indians. Although he picked up scraps about Sendero’s leader, who dubbed himself Presidente Gonzalo, he never got to meet him and turned to fiction to imagine this “formal and dogmatic” man who, in Jesuit style, made his students study Mariátegui like the Bible. The writer Maruja Torres landed in Ayacucho in 1986 and found soldiers with machine guns and balaclavas waiting. The military atmosphere, she said, was like Vargas Llosa’s novel La ciudad y los perros. She was told that she might be mistaken for a subversive and killed. Wherever she walked in the town, she was followed. She tried to buy a map in a bookstore and one of those following her shouted aloud “She smells like a whore!” In her hotel she was warned to be careful as the “followers” had hired the room next door. She then decided not to report on Ayacucho, burned her contacts’ names and did not venture out from her hotel. The first fictional treatment of Guzmán’s Shining Path was Shakespeare’s The Vision of Elena Silves (1989). It reads partly like a journalis63

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tic report but with echoes of Graham Greene. At its heart the novel is a love story, with Gabriel Lung, part Chinese and a Guevara revolutionary, changing sides and becoming a senderista. He falls for Elena, whose vision of the Archangel Gabriel is actually one of the guerrilla Gabriel. We read of a prison massacre (which actually took place in 1986), and about abortive and absurd revolutionary uprisings. Finally, we meet Guzmán himself, with his diseased face (psoriasis) covered with pustules and listening to Frank Sinatra records in secret. We overhear Guzmán ridicule Fidel Castro as a “chorus girl” and we witness his lecture on Peru as a “land which refused to see its own reality—that it was a land of Indians.” The Quechua-speaking Andean Indians are the real Peruvians, he claims: “They had more to teach me. They don’t steal. They don’t lie. They don’t covet their neighbour’s wife.” In an interview Shakespeare admitted that had he been born poor in Ayacucho he would have joined the senderistas. He later wrote a novel, The Dancer Upstairs (1995), about Guzmán’s eventual capture in 1992 in a ballet school in Lima and made into a film by John Malkovich. By 1991, according to Simon Strong, Sendero Luminoso had caused $15 billion worth of economic damage and left 22,000 people dead. More recently, another novelist, the Peruvian Santiago Roncagliolo, wrote a study, La cuarta espada (2007), of Guzmán and Sendero Luminoso. The title, the “Fourth Sword”, highlights Guzmán’s self-canonization as fourth in line to Marx, Lenin and Mao. He was not able to meet Guzmán, but interviewed his lover and others involved. Roncagliolo’s honest account—he calls himself a “mercenary of words”—does capture the Ayacucho philosophy professor intimately. He reveals that he never used the pronoun “I”, never referred to his private life, even his last lover called him “President” in bed, had no friends, only comrades, never cried, admired Mao, played chess, read and wrote everyday and gave unending speeches, one lasting eighteen hours, outdoing even Castro and Hugo Chávez. Roncagliolo noted that Guzmán spoke carefully and slowly with a serrano accent, dropping articles and pronouns. While a professor Guzmán had worked on his students; he was imprisoned three times before going underground and beginning the armed struggle in 1980. In Ayacucho his home on Calle Libertad was known as the Kremlin. Roncagliolo calls him Peru’s greatest assassin, and dedicated his book to the 69,280 dead in the armed conflict (obviously from both sides). Another 64

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consequence of Sendero’s inhuman violence was the migration of some 600,000 “peasants” who drifted to the cities, especially Lima. Though Guzmán believed he was fighting for the upland peasants, they fought back against his vision of revolution. In the 13,000-feet-high village of Lucanamarca, for example, villagers killed two senderistas. In revenge, 69 villagers were slaughtered by machetes and stones to save bullets. Sendero Luminoso’s principles were never steal, never betray and never be lazy, a guerrilla adaptation of the three laws of the Inca empire, and to this extent it was an Andean movement. According to Roncagliolo, Sendero’s greatest strength was its ideological, almost religious, conviction and a suppression of all individuality (close to the Incas again). The only aspects of human nature they could not control, he discovered as he interviewed women activists in prison, was love and hate. Roncagliolo had earlier written a novel exploring Sendero Luminoso called Abril rojo (Red April, 2006), where he speculates as to what Sendero stood for almost twenty years after its leader’s capture. The novel is set in Ayacucho during Holy Week in the millennial year 2000. A public prosecutor named Chacaltana who believes in legality, talks to his dead mother, recites Chocano’s poems and is ill-at-ease with his body as he follows up leads concerning ritualistic murders. He falls for a far younger waitress and rapes her as she turns out to be a fledgling senderista. Roncagliolo suggests that Sendero Luminoso is endemic to the Andes, the symptom of an ingrained hatred for white limeños. As the prosecutor tries to gather evidence he becomes aware that in Ayacucho nobody talks to anybody and that the Andean Indians are impenetrable, having learnt not to talk to whites, and never to trust them. When he rapes the girl, she curses him as a “devil’s son”, the worst swear-word in Quechua (the devil is the white man). The prosecutor understands that “the enemy was like the mountains, mute, immobile, mimetic, part of the landscape.” He knows that the army fights against “ghosts, dead people, the spirit of the Andes”. When he strolls out of town, past the Christ on the Acuchimay hill, to stare at a “landscape of dry, interminable mountains with a river down below”, he concentrates on the silence: “No sounds. He heard a whistling in his ears, the acoustic illusion that arises when nothing sounds around us”; the upland pampa, he realizes, “was transmitting the music of death.”

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The Andes Imagined (4): José María Arguedas and Abancay Arguedas’ wife was a member of Sendero Luminoso. He was born in Andahuaylas in the central Peruvian Andes, some ten hours today by car from Cuzco. The road follows the Apurímac river, with the snow-topped Salcantay peak in view. The school in Arguedas’ novel Los ríos profundos is in the town of Abancay and is a microcosm of Andean life. The town lies in a green valley at some 8,500 feet and can be stiflingly hot, is all cement and ugly. The Indians live in the valleys in their adobe houses, with pigs in the mud. They walk miles to market, and have neither drinking water nor electricity nor doctors nor a school (and I cite a journalist from 2002) and many still only speak Quechua. Yet Dervla Murphy found the people “extraordinarily friendly and hospitable,” in the “ancient heartland” of the Quechua. She was told to rub lemon juice on her numerous insect bites as Murphy constantly scratched her “bitten bottom”, much to her daughter’s mortification. Arguedas’ fourteen-year-old narrator Ernesto is sent by his vagabond father to the college in Abancay. The town is surrounded by large haciendas. The college’s Padre Director praises the landowners in his sermons as he rails against the Chileans, and only ever preaches in Spanish in church. The boy walks past a sugar factory, and notices the dirty Indians, who have lost their memories of ancestral life in the ayllu. The only lively quarter in Abancay is Huanupata, meaning “mound of rubbish”, where the market vendors and porters live. Here too are the chicherías of the town, staffed by pretty mestizas and swarming with flies. While the harpist and violinist play sad huaynos, locals “remember the clouds in the highlands, so threatening, cold and merciless or the interminable snow fields.” Remembering the Andes through music captures the fate of the Abancay Indians and is the theme of Arguedas’ writing. In the fictional town live landowners, traders and poor whites in ruined houses. Every house has an orchard and there are empty lots where the boys play war games between the Peruvians and Chileans (the Peruvians always win). Mulberry trees, not native to Peru, abound. Much of the novel deals with boarding school life (where only one boy cannot speak Quechua). But one character stands out, the mad woman, la opa. She is not Indian, has fair hair and a white face, and is squat and fat. She is seen leaving the Director’s bedroom or hides in the lavatory. Another boy is the 66

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only one from an ayllu and he never really learns Castilian. His father visits and shouts at him, breaking into Quechua when he loses his temper. He is bullied and miserable, embodying the fate of indigenous Peruvians. In one episode there is a fight between Ernesto and another boy. Ernesto appeals to the gods of the village he was brought up in while his father travelled. He prays to an apu, a mountain god, and asks for the god’s killincho (kestrel), imagining the peaks as his Indian friends did when dressed as condors to fight the bulls. The other crucial incident that gives the reader insight into Andean mysteries is the “uprising” of the mestiza women who mass in the main plaza to demonstrate for more salt. Ernesto studies the leader, one of the chicheras, Doña Felipa, who is fat and sweating through wearing a hat with silk ribbons. She has a wide face, marked with smallpox, breathes deeply and speaks in Quechua. After the local police are disarmed she leads the women to the salt factory where they break into the storeroom and help themselves to the salt. There is then a fiesta and Ernesto, tasting chicha for the first time, feels protected. Later, troops arrive and pursue the women, who are caught and whipped in front of their husbands. But Doña Felipa evades capture and resists with her stolen rifles, promising to return to Abancay and burn down the large farms and free the “serfs”. In the battle between the Spanish-speaking army, clergy and landowners on one side and the longsuffering Quechua-speaking Indians on the other, one phrase from the Padre Director’s sermon strikes a chord: “You must remember Cajamarca!” The crucial encounter between Pizarro and the Incas (see pp.79-84) is kept alive as a warning, the very name of that Inca town capturing the essential conflict of the Andes. One final image holds the novel together as insight into the reality of indigenous Andean life. Ernesto peeps into an Indian’s hut and sees two young girls by a fire. One has a needle and is digging parasites out of her younger sister, whose vagina is covered with little white sacks of eggs, like white pimples. The stink and flies are so bad that he has to abandon the hut, sickened to the extent that he is ready to die. Tschiffely admired the skill an Indian boy he took with him through Ecuador showed with a needle; he carefully dug the needle into the skin at the edge of grey spots and pulled out jelly-like bags, about the size and shape of an average pearl. Tschiffely became infected but noted, without disgust, “it is common to see Indians pick these pests out of each other’s 67

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feet.” The parasites, known as niguas, infect sufferers with Chagas disease, or mal de Chagas. Some have argued that Charles Darwin was bitten by a nigua and suffered all his later life at Down House. The nineteenthcentury American traveller Isaac Holton found that wearing sandals rather than boots near Bogotá meant that four or five niguas would bury themselves in his feet each day. They itched, but with a pin he also became skilled in digging out the little white sack. How they reproduced inside his cuticles puzzled him, and he heard about people who had died with thousands of nigua eggs in their bodies. Arguedas’ strange, asexual image of the two Indian girls inspires revulsion in the narrator and reader for the poverty and abuse suffered by the defeated Indians. Arguedas himself had lived a split life in the racist highlands, with his white parents and his beloved servants. He later discovered that he “hated himself because he was an orphan,” that he had internalized this cultural conflict. Arguedas eventually killed himself, leaving a note expressing his despair at the irreconcilability of the Spanish and Quechua worlds.

Bridges A peculiarity of the sudden geological uplifting of the Andes is the great number of gorges and ravines cut deep by snowmelt rivers and torrents. The Inca road system depended on dependable bridges, made from stone or liana, though the famous “Puente del Inca” under Mount Aconcagua in Argentina is a natural arch of sulphurous rock. Zárate, the Spanish chronicler, was amazed that some bridges made of maguey (sisal) stretched and swung more than a hundred feet in the air over dizzying drops. The Inca Garcilaso said that mimbre (reed) bridges, constructed with interwoven thick reed ropes, made the Inca army famous as it let troops cross gorges quickly. The bridge over the Apurímac river (meaning “great speaker” on account of its loud torrent) was 200 steps long; von Hagen wrote that there “was no way of steadying it in the wind and the early Spaniards crossed it in terror.” Hugh Thompson tried to cross a similar rope bridge over the Aobamba that swung so much that his mules refused to step on it. The indigenous Peruvian Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, a sixteenth-century engraver and critic of Spanish colonial rule, illustrated a particular bridge, lamenting that “many Indians died” due to poor maintenance under the Spanish. Built in 1350 and used until 1890, this Inca 68

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bridge entered the title of Thornton Wilder’s extraordinary novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The opening lines are well-known: On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below. This bridge was on the high road between Lima and Cuzco, and hundreds of persons passed over it everyday. It had been woven of osier by the Incas more than a century before, and visitors to the city were always led out to see it. It was a mere ladder of thin slats swung out over the gorge, with handrails of dried vine. Horses and coaches and chairs had to go down hundreds of feet below and pass over the narrow torrents on rafts…

Wilder then introduces his five characters and his priest-narrator puzzles over whether fate exists, the nature of accidents and why they and not others fell to their deaths in the Apurímac below. It is a historical novel, with at least two of the characters being real: the actress La Perricholi and the viceroy. In real life Micaela Villegas earned her nickname Perricholi for being the mestiza mistress of the viceroy (that is a “perra chola”, or half-caste bitch). Her scandalous life had been admired by the French author Max Radiguet and turned into a drama by Prosper Mérimée. Strangely, Wilder only visited Peru in 1941, after his novel had made him famous, and the psychologically astute book was based entirely on library research. One last sort of Andean bridge was described by Johann Jacob von Tschudi and was called the huaro. It consisted of one long thick rope stretched across a ravine, with a pulley, a seat and another rope to pull sitting people across. The Swiss traveller moaned that it was the worst way he could imagine to cross a river, as one’s weight makes one sink down, brushing the water. Horses and donkeys were forced to swim across the river, and von Tschudi preferred swimming like them.

Climbing the Cordilleras: Huaraz, Chavín de Huántar and Nevado Huascarán Also near but north of Lima lies Huaraz, a provincial capital and Peru’s climbing centre chosen by Matthew Parris and three English friends for a walking tour of the Andes. Visible from the town are the peaks of Nevado Huascarán, Huandoy and San Cristóbal. The four men bussed up the coast 69

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and into the mountains, through Huaraz to Chiquián. In Inka-Kola (1990) Parris writes wittily, appears nonchalant about stench, poverty and hazards, and avoids superfluous information or analysis. He captures the spirit of Huaraz as a modest town with a horrific history. In 1941 an earth tremor released a lake that washed away the town, leaving some 6,000 dead. In 1970 an earthquake then killed over 80,000. The town has since been reconstructed with low buildings. He remarks that “there is nothing spectacular about the place: just a breathtaking backdrop.” The town illustrates the power of the Andes, quite different to images of the Swiss Alps or other mountains. He pinpoints what attracts him to the place and people as a mixture of “squalor and finery”. The trekkers reach Llamac, a remote village of dark alleys without electricity, arriving at night with everyone seemingly asleep. It is cold, the stars very bright and the flanks of the high Andes loom over everything. They then walk up into the high valleys, despite being “dogged by diarrhoea” and mountain sickness, and pitch tents at the edge of Lake Jahuacocha. Parris evokes the spirit of place: Now we were within sight of the glaciers at whose skirts Jahuacocha lay. Mountains towered all around us, some snowy, others—lower—made from raw red rock, like mountains from another planet. Granite cliffs, and groves of the strange, dark conifers clawing fingers up impossibly steep and remote place, combined to give the scene a science-fiction quality.

The group is looked after by Fortunato and his family in their shack. Parris admires his host’s awareness of the mountains around: Fortunato had a very present sense of the beauty of the place where he lived. He told us the names of all the mountains; which were higher, which more dangerous, which most beautiful. He told us, too, that a handful of European climbers were killed in this range every few years. Smiling, he said he believed that the gods of the place required a few bodies every now and then, so he would not dissuade tourists from climbing there. “Let them take gringos,” Fortunato chuckled, “instead of our people.”

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The Argentine José Luis Fonrouge (see p.207) was there in 1964 to try to scale Mount Yerupaja, 21,636 feet, in the most beautiful area of the Andes. He had always disliked the arid, scorched, naked mountains around Mendoza and in northern Argentina, preferring the Chilean side of the Patagonian divide with its woods, red and black earth and rivers. However, here in Peru he was defeated, not by his lack of skill but by fog and squalls and a temperature of minus eighteen. With the peak covered he retreated down. Fonrouge noticed how the Indians called him a “gringo”; no other country in the world, he wrote, made him feel more foreign than in Peru, where even the dogs chased him. The Andeans, he thought, hate the whites but tried to wheedle anything off them, even empty tins. He in turn treated them badly, “so foreigners become tyrants.” The Irish-born traveller Dervla Murphy reached the Cordillera Blanca after a “lung-buster” of a climb, with her daughter and donkey, up from the Pomabamba valley. Her description catches that other-worldiness of the mountains: Across a wide, shallow valley rose the snow-burdened mightiness of a long line of serrated summits, the two highest peaks just below 20,000 feet. All morning we had met no one and here on the immense sloping plateau—sun-warmed and snow-cooled, vividly green beneath a strongly blue sky—I had the illusion of having actually left the inhabited world, as though we were now on another planet.

Up another valley near Huaraz lies Chavín de Huántar, situated on a natural “nexus” between two rivers and mountain passes at 10,330 feet. Hugh Thomson describes it as the “old temple town and wellspring of Andean culture”. It is a quiet, forgotten village but for the ruins that Julio Tello found and began clearing in 1919. What is called the “Castillo”, close in spirit to Kafka’s castle or a Borges labyrinth with its galleries and passageways and a white granite statue known as the Lanzón (great lance), was found only in 1972. Rebecca Stone-Miller thinks it is the clue to a shamanistic cult intending to disorientate and transport the viewer into alternative realities. This monolithic sculpture is located deep inside the temple and represents the four directions, links the earth to the sky and pinpoints the exact centre of the earth. Stone-Miller points out that there were no light sources, no signs that torches were burnt, so that it had to 71

Nevado Caraz, Callejón de Huaylas

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be imagined in the dark. Thomson evokes its power: “The figure was made up of many elements—fangs, claws, some features that were human, many were not—but it was the shocking, outsize scale that overwhelmed.” A centre of hallucinogenic substances where priests turned themselves into jaguars to appease the cosmic forces controlling the unpredictable weather, Chavín de Huántar died out around 200BC. Then in 1945 a lake burst its banks and a flood of mud and water buried the ruins, killing many people. Chavín pottery is still found all over the Andes, and even the Quechua language may have started there. Thomson does not doubt the place’s psychic power, representing the start of a truly shared pan-Andean culture. Even so, recent research questions this “origin” as Andean sites like Caral and Cerro Sechín reach further back into time. The Peruvian writer Daniel Alarcón, who moved to the United States as a boy and writes in English, recorded his visit to Corongo for BBC radio. He nicknamed it the “padlocked city” because most had left the village for Lima. Alarcón spoke of the silence, of a “gigantic cathedral of peace”; he also recorded Andean huaynos about leaving the village, though internet and roads have brought Lima nearer (now only fourteen hours by bus), and learned how all the villagers return for the feasts in June. The Nevado Huascarán stands at 22,205 feet, the highest mountain in Peru. It forms part of the Cordillera Blanca and the Callejón de Huaylas, a climber’s Mecca. The first recorded person to scale it was a woman, Annie Peck, in 1908. Loren McIntyre retold the sorry story of its massive explosion. On 31 May 1970 a quake of 7.7 on the Richter scale set off landslides that devastated the area. Apparently a gigantic million-ton slab of ice and rock fell off the Nevado’s north peak, skidded down a glacier at 200 miles an hour into meadowlands, pushing up a wall of earth, ice and boulders. The village of Yungay, 13,000 feet below, had been rebuilt behind a ridge after an avalanche destroyed it in the 1870s but was not spared in 1970. Everyone died, except a few people who were in the outlying cemetery and children at a circus; some 18,000 were killed, though Parris claims figures far higher. A character in Ciro Alegría’s El mundo es ancho y ajeno, escapes his destiny as a peasant, working his way on a horse across the highlands towards Lima, literacy and political leadership. He reaches the famous Callejón de Huaylas, within sight of the Cordillera Negra of high black 73

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peaks and the taller Cordillera Blanca, so steep that only a few passes exist. Then comes Huascarán, seen in another light: There the inaccessible Huascarán lorded over all. And among the ranges, that one glance could not encompass and as long as several weeks to cross, was the Callejón de Huaylas. Packed with valleys, slopes, estates, villages, huts, Indians. The countryside was beautiful and the life of its people very sad. The Indians spoke Quechua and some Castilian. All worked for the landowners or bosses in villages. The work was harder than in the north and wages lower.

Huánuco A town on the eastern slopes of the Andes on the Upper Huallaga river, Huánuco stands at 4,500 feet. Carleton Beals described the mountains around the town as “bleak sky-jutting heights. The terrific panorama makes man pinioned there on the ledge of nowhere seem unusually insignificant.” These peaks—Marabamba, Rondos and Paucarbamba— guard a mountain spirit, worshipped in secret shrines decorated with bones and amulets. Beals summarizes the power of these peaks: Marabamba is perfectly geometrical, without a blade of grass or a human hut, sheer barren rock and under the moon “an overwhelmingly melancholy spectacle”; Rondos is tumult, confusion, chaos, a furious upheaval, covered with streams and patches of cultivated land; Paucarbamba is harsh, aggressive, sharp pinnacles defying the sky. The peaks unlock Beals’ fantasy, but remain a “menace”, rumbling as if muttering some terrible prophecy. Beals meets an old Pilco Indian poet; Rondos is angry, he says, and wants sheep, coca and food. At night he moves and speaks. In 1777 the Spanish crown sent out two botanists, Hipólito Ruiz López and José Antonio Pavón, to accompany the French scientist Joseph Dombey on an eleven-year trip. They reached Tarma, at some 10,000 feet, in 1779, and climbed half way up Churupallana, hearing mournful screams that turned out to be birds called “lost souls”. In 1780 they reached Huánuco, where they studied quinine, coca and rubber plants. They found that the seeds of a thorn-apple induced a trance like drunkenness. The year at Huánuco left their legs covered in a “kind of eruption that ended in amazing and itching pimples,” but they were cured by hot albergilla plants applied on the raw skin. This could have been the Andean 74

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disease of verruga (warts), described by von Tschudi as beginning with headaches and pain in the bones until stains and red warts erupt. He conjectured that it came from the drinking water, and even donkeys were not immune. López and Pavón returned to Huánuco in 1784, but found themselves stuck in a snowstorm in the cordillera. López wrote: “I thought I was going to die in that uninhabited place on account of the cold. I was attacked by a terrible griping and thirst and we had to break the ice to drink water.” (That “griping” was Andean pressure on the stomach and wind.) While there, their hut burned down and they lost three years of notes. As Edward J. Goodman observed, only a silver pot in which they urinated survived. In 1788 they returned to Madrid in the ship El Jasón with 73 boxes of dried plants, 24 tubs of live plants and 586 drawings.

Jauja Once the provisional capital of conquered Peru, this small town remains quietly Andean at 11,162 feet, its cathedral the first to be built in South America when Pizarro was there in 1534. It had been the site of a confrontation described by Prescott between Hernando Pizarro and an enormous Incan army under Calicuchima. Pizarro’s horses’ shoes were so worn out in the absence of iron that they had to be fitted with silver shoes to continue. Pizarro then requested that the Inca general accompany him to meet Atahualpa in Cajamarca, and he did. Hemming called this decision a “tragic mistake” and no chronicler has explained why he gave up with such docility. By 1615 an anonymous traveller could say that the Jauja valley, under lofty peaks, was “world renowned”, with fourteen Indian communities and large Franciscan and Dominican monasteries (though the Indians apparently went on “drunken sprees” and worshipped the devil they called supay). By siding with the Spaniards against their Inca overlords, the Xauxas, the original tribe, were left alone. From March 1839 to the end of 1840 the Swiss naturalist von Tschudi stayed in Jauja. On his way, a donkey fell into a ravine and he lost all his scientific instruments and his diary recording fourteen months of research. He said that meeting a mule-train on the Andean passes was terrifying as there was no room for two to pass. All his childhood he had dreamt of visiting the Andes. Von Tschudi (1818-89), a doctor and philosopher and disciple of Humboldt, arrived in Callao, Peru, in 1838 and travelled around the country until 1846. He took detailed notes, published as a 75

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diary in 1846. It is probably the best guide—his curiosity covered everything—to nineteenth-century Peru and the Andes, though he did not reach Cuzco. He published a book on Peruvian antiquities and another on Quechua, the first modern study of the Inca language, which included the Quechuan drama Ollanta. He returned to Latin America in 1858, writing a book on the Atacama Desert, on his way to Lake Titicaca. He crossed the Andes by way of Catamarca. Von Tschudi befriended another of Humboldt’s protégés, the painter Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802-58), who spent fourteen years sketching and travelling through Latin America, visiting Peru and Bolivia in 184244. In all, he produced over 5,000 paintings and drawings. His 1843 oil “View in the Environs of Lima” looks across a fertile valley to sunset on the gilded Andes. Humboldt had instructed him to avoid Buenos Aires and Chile and to “go to the snow-covered mountains and volcanoes, the chain mountains of the Andes,” but he disobeyed, spending ten years in Chile. The Andes, as visualized by Humboldt and his Romantic disciples like Tschudi and Rugendas, became stereotypical. Jauja entered the literary map of the Andes with a wonderful untranslated novel called País de Jauja (1993) by Edgardo Rivera Martínez. This dense work functions as the tale of a young musician and writer’s initiation into life during school holidays between December 1946 and March 1947. The boy, Claudio Alaya, is orphaned of his radical schoolteaching father and brought up by his poor sewing, piano-playing mother, having lost their land. He grows up fascinated by his family history, local Andean myths and culture, as well as western books, and includes letters from a sister who is a painter in Lima. In Jauja he discovers how the world reaches him through a cast of eccentrics who range from a sexy widow called Zoraida to a pompous hairdresser and a coffin-making theosophist. The fictional Jauja has absorbed everything—from Mozart to boleros and local Andean songs, from Homer to Vallejo. This “forgotten province” is the source of a new race: “We are so hybrid!” the boy exclaims, as if Jauja is the real heart of inland Peru and Peruvian identity. In the town’s tuberculosis clinic (Jauja was a TB treatment centre in the nineteenth century) he meets beautiful girls from Lima, a Romanian Jew and a university professor—the world seems to congregate there—but it is his love for the local Laurita that lasts, with her “Andean touch that you so appreciated.” 76

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Traveller George Woodcock was there in 1958 in what he called the principal farming region of the Central Andes, in a town of baroque domes and rich lichen-yellow tiles. He was struck by Jauja’s “immeasurable antiquity”. Dervla Murphy and daughter, ten weeks into their Andean walk, with bloodshot eyes from the wind, sun-blackened faces, cracked lips and hair “like a gorilla’s mane”, stayed four days in Jauja. She called the town “history-sodden”, roamed its market and had a thorough wash in the river. The Peruvian phrase “la tierra de Jauja” stands for a “land of milk and honey”, a special kind of happy provincial paradise, almost frozen in time.

The Source of the Amazon The massive, mythical River Amazon was first navigated by Francisco de Orellana in 1542 as he searched for El Dorado in the jungle. He had been warned about fearsome armed, one-breasted women archers, so called the river the Amazon. It was previously named the Marañón after a Spanish captain, and became the Solimoès and Amazonas in Brazil. Charles-Marie de La Condamine, after completing his eleven-year measurement of the earth’s shape in Quito, decided to draw a proper map of the Amazon in 1743. He located its source in an Andean lake also called Marañón. He described three routes to the river in his 1745 Voyage sur l’Amazone, taken by missionaries. One went past the Tonguragua volcano. He took the route to Loja, bypassing the Pongo rapids, to start his trip where the river was navigable and become the first scientist to drift down its waters. In 1977 Alex Shoumatoff hoped to solve the mystery of the river’s exact source, possibly up the Marañón river in Lake Lauricocha, 14,000 feet high in the Andes. He then realized that the source was more likely to be found up the Apurímac, collecting water from Lake Vilafro, at 15,538 feet near Minaspata (18,150 feet). He set off for Arequipa and the Cordillera Blanca, the upper reaches of the Apurímac, yet there was no transport to the nearest village Cailloma, with its “bright red rock, bare ochre earth and distant blue peaks”. He hiked to Yauri, took a truck to Livitaca and the Katanga ore mine owned by Japanese, but became too ill with malaria to continue. More recently in 2000 a National Geographic team located a glacial stream on a rock face of Nevado Mismi (18,363 feet) that flows into the Apurímac where a white cross indicates the actual source. The Amazon is now officially longer than the Nile at 4,250 miles from Andean source to 77

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Atlantic mouth. Simon Lamb, up in Bolivia, never ceased to be fascinated by the thought that “I can dip my hands into any river flowing off the eastern flanks of the Andes and touch water that, after following a tortuous route across the grain of the mountains will finally reach the Atlantic.”

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Peru/Ecuador Cajamarca and the Inca’s Head The last Inca emperor Atahualpa has been called a quiteño, as he settled in his palace in tropical Quito. He was one of the hundred sons and daughters of Huayna Capac, who divided his empire into two for his two main sons, Atahualpa and Huascar. They lived at first in peace, then arguments ignited a civil war into which the Spaniards arrived. Atahualpa, or Atabaliba as he was known in the chronicles, met his end in one of the great anecdotes of history in Cajamarca (9,020 feet high), in today’s Peru, on the Inca road linking Quito and Cuzco. Rather than take the Inca highway to Cuzco Pizarro decided to cut through the Andes. Atahualpa had left his forts empty, so all the Spaniards had to fear was the ascent in their armour from the hot desert coast to the freezing peaks. They reached Cajamarca on Friday 15 November 1532. An eyewitness, Francisco de Jerez, described the town as lying in a flat valley crossed by two rivers at the foot of a mountain, with about 2,000 inhabitants. He noted that the “square is larger than any in Spain” and was walled with mud bricks. The houses were divided into eight rooms and had running water. There was a stone fort, with another one on the mountainside above the town. The tambo (storehouse) was off the square. Zárate drew attention to the red dye that “dazzled” the Spaniards in the reed roofs and indoor walls. Nearby was also what he called a “mosque” (visitors had to take off their shoes to enter) and a nunnery. Across the Inca empire, and especially in Cuzco, there were buildings housing virgins dedicated to the sun-god. They wove cloth which when finished was mixed with white bones from llamas and burnt to ash. The ash was then scattered, according to Zárate, into the wind in the direction of the sun. Such was the scene for a historical anecdote that still thrills. It concerns the first meeting between a sun-god and the representative of the Holy Roman Emperor, the grandest king in Europe. Atahualpa had ten thousand soldiers with him, while Francisco Pizarro had one hundred and 79

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seventy-seven men, sixty-seven of them on horseback. The odds could not have been more uneven. Atahualpa approached in his litter, with some four hundred Indians sweeping away pebbles and twigs. He had been fasting. He had promised Pizarro that his men would be unarmed, though some may have hidden slings and coshes under their short-sleeved shirts. The Spaniards, meanwhile, had prepared an ambush. There was suddenly a hail storm as they stood in the huge, main square of Cajamarca. Pizarro sent out a Dominican friar, his chaplain, to parley with the sun-god. The friar, Fray Vicente de Valverde (later Bishop of Cuzco), went forward with an interpreter called Young Felipe (a Guancavilca Indian). He held a cross in his right hand and the Bible, or maybe a breviary, in his left. Carleton Beals called it a “lumpish brass-clasp object”. “What I teach is what God told us and that is in this book,” the friar said to Atahualpa in Spanish that was translated by Felipe. In Zárate’s later account Valverde gave a long lecture on Christian doctrine, but in an “extremely harsh and abrupt” manner. Bible, of course, means book, but the Incas had never seen a book before and had not invented writing. The clash between a sophisticated oral culture and an imperial literate one could not be more clear-cut. Atahualpa asked the friar if he could inspect the Bible. The friar thought he would kiss it, but Atahualpa tried to open a page and could not. The friar helped him and was pushed away (“a blow on the arm”). Then he opened a page and with “great disdain” (another chronicler said “with rage”) threw the Bible some five or six paces away. The friar walked back to Governor Pizarro and called Atahualpa “a dog filled with pride”. This gesture of hurling the Bible to the ground in anger triggered off the massacre. Guaman Poma de Ayala’s account, with some 450 illustrations, repeats the accepted version, but allows for Inca reactions to Spanish greed: “and they ate gold and silver, as did their horses.” Horses, of course, had never been seen before and caused panic and astonishment, but so did beards. Poma described the Spanish as having their “faces covered in llama wool”. Guaman Poma, like Garcilaso de la Vega, was a mestizo born of a conquistador father and Inca princess mother, though he claimed roots back to pre-Inca families in the altiplano. He grew up in Suntuntu, near today’s Ayacucho. He had been an interpreter, and mixed Quechua with Spanish. He spent some thirty years, roughly from 1585 to 1615, when he boasted of reaching eighty years of age, writing a long letter to Philip III detailing 81

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the abuses suffered by the Indians, especially at the hands of the Church, in the mines and by corregidores, listing all that he knew. The Spaniards, he complained, were “such absolute lords that they didn’t fear God.” However, this massive, dense letter of 1,200 pages never reached the king and was found in 1908 in Copenhagen. Guamán Poma lamented the loss the Incas suffered when their divine emperor Atagualpa Inga (his spelling) was killed: “the Indians wandered about lost from their gods and holy places.” He famously concluded: “to write is to weep.” The historian William Prescott evoked that cold November day in 1532; he too summoned up the imperial litter, the recent fasting, the shock of seeing horses and the crimson borla or fringe indicating Inca nobility on Atahualpa’s forehead. His version of events has the friar Valverde trying to persuade Atahualpa of the Christian truths of the Trinity and Christ. In Prescott’s dramatic words, Atahualpa took the book and “turned over the pages a moment, then, as the insult he had received probably flashed across his mind, he threw it down with vehemence.” Within half an hour the Spaniards slaughtered between six and seven thousand unarmed Inca soldiers in the Cajamarca plaza, losing, according to one account, one black soldier. Guamán Poma said that they killed the poor Indians “like ants”. They captured Atahualpa by pulling him off his litter by his long hair. An artillery shot, the battle cry of “Santiago”, loud trumpets, arquebuses and the fierce horsemen with their double-sided swords did the rest. Horses, dogs, guns, beards, white men, rats and even diseases came with the conquistadors. Whatever happened to this crucial Bible or breviary that Atahualpa threw to the ground? Did it end up in Cuzco’s cathedral? Was it in Latin? Was Valverde one of the few who could read it? The wall of misunderstanding was total, and the irony was that Pizarro could not even sign his name, was as illiterate as Atahualpa, and could not have read the Bible or breviary (as Hemming claims it was). A further layer of irony reinforces the replay of this encounter through the ages and is the question of translation. Zárate claimed that Felipe’s translation rendered the monk’s speech even worse and more provocative. He also alleged that Felipe came from the Island of Puna near coastal Guayaquil and hardly knew Quechua or Spanish, which he spoke as “badly as a Negro straight from Africa”. What Spanish he had picked up came from rough and tough soldiers, even if he had accompanied Pizarro to 82

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Castile. Zárate showed how Felipe translated “One God in three persons” as “God three and one are four” so that “in fact, he interpreted most of the religious truths in a contrary sense.” Felipe later confessed that he had deliberately mistranslated because he had designs on one of Atahualpa’s wives (adultery was punished by death, including all the adulterer’s family) He had tried to flee from Diego de Almagro when he heard that there was to be an Inca rebellion. Almagro caught him, and had him executed and quartered. Such was Felipe’s fate for mistranslating. Prescott’s account of Pizarro’s cunning defeat of the Inca sun god is situated in a theatre of Andean beauty: Before him rose the stupendous Andes, rock piled upon rock, their skirts below dark with evergreen forests… and their crests of snow glittering high in the heavens—presenting altogether such a wild chaos of magnificence and beauty as no other mountain scenery in the world can show.

Cajamarca itself was also a fort with nearby a thermal spring that had hot baths (the Inca bath carved in the stone is still there). A chronicle said that the water was too hot to touch. We can only imagine what passed through Atahualpa’s mind for there are no Inca accounts. In fact, combing the chronicles I came across only one moment, in Zárate, when Indians taunted the Spaniards with questions like “why do you wander the world? You must be idle vagabonds, since you stay nowhere to work and sow the earth.” I agree with Mario Vargas Llosa’s interpretation that the Inca was struck by “religious terror”, and that when his vastly superior troops saw that their “god” had been captured they simply could not act. Individuals did not count in their world as the state religion made all decisions. The Inca army was thus suddenly “orphaned”. Then there was the fear that Pizarro was himself a god, and terror caused by the dogs, the horses, the gunpowder, the beards (and later the diseases). A translation into Spanish of the famous Quechua lament on the death of the Inca Atahualpa records how “everything and everybody hid, disappeared, suffering.” The death of their sun god left the people “perplexed, lost, their memories negated, alone.” The Quechua-speaking people now lived a “wandering life”. The chronicler Cieza de León recorded that Atahualpa’s death was “such that 83

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the lamentation and shrieks rose to the skies, causing the birds to fall to the ground.” The second mighty clash of cultures was over gold. Atahualpa quickly grasped how hungry for gold the Spaniards were, and tried to bargain for his release from captivity. He promised to fill a large room twenty-two feet long and seventeen wide with gold up to a white line. Pizarro drew a red line higher on the wall, and had a notary record the act. A smaller room was to be filled with silver. And so the cramming of the room began. Prescott wrote that “the greedy eyes of the Conquerors gloated on the shining heaps of treasure.” But it took time as the metals had to be hauled from all four corners of the empire, known by the Incas as Tawantinsuyu. Meanwhile, the Inca was allowed his concubines, was not fettered and even learned to play chess. Today you can visit Atahualpa’s prison room in Cajamarca, which is not the ransom room. The deal with the booty was that one-fifth was due to the Spanish crown. This fifth part was not melted down, so that the German-speaking Holy Roman Emperor Charles V could appreciate Inca artistry (until he melted it down). The rest—over eleven tons—was melted into ingots and weighed, reaching (I cite Prescott) one million three hundred and twentysix thousand five hundred and thirty-nine pesos de oro—that is, almost $20 million in 1961, according to von Hagen. (Hemming raised this to £30 million in 1993. He also lamented the destruction of the masterpieces of Inca goldsmiths as “an irreparable artistic loss”.) The third emblematic moment was, inevitably, Atahualpa’s execution on 26 July 1533. On the basis of threats of armies, cannibals and Inca uprisings, Pizarro rushed into a trial, accusing Atahualpa of twelve crimes including idolatry, murder of a brother, usurping the crown and bigamy. It was a list “so absurd”, Prescott wrote, “that it might provoke a smile.” Did Prescott invent this trial? Hemming claimed that there was no such trial. Whatever the case, it made no difference as Atahualpa was already dead before he died. Although he begged for his life, he was led that night to Cajamarca’s huge plaza to be burnt alive at a stake. The Incas preserved themselves as mummies in order to arise again in the future, so burning was out of the question for the emperor. A last-minute repentance changed the manner of death to a garrotte, a form of strangulation with an iron collar or wire. Atahualpa died baptized as Juan de Atahualpa and by the original monk Valverde who had shown him the Bible. 84

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Prescott summarized the mock trial as “one of the darkest chapters in Spanish colonial history”. Much of his account may be what is called the “black legend”, the deliberate exaggeration of Spanish abuses, and later historians like Hemming qualify Prescott’s inventions. The Spanish king, for instance, was displeased at Atahualpa’s death for kings, even Inca ones, were not to be put on trial, as they too were divine. He conveyed this to Pizarro. According to eyewitness chroniclers, Atahualpa was about thirty years old, muscular, handsome and fierce, a stereotype recreated by the poet Rubén Darío with his “cruel and sensual” Inca, but with bloodshot eyes, and was always serious. The contemporary historians stress that he “never showed happiness.” He also refused to look the Spanish in the eye, but that was an Inca custom for it was “disrespectful to look their prince in the eye.” Zárate, who was not there but collated witness reports twenty years later, claimed that Atahualpa was so intelligent that he learned Spanish in twenty days, as well as chess. He had asked a monk to write down certain dictated words and then had another monk, in private, read them back to him, “and thus he learnt to understand this marvel.” This marvel was writing and reading, a mental act beyond Pizarro’s abilities, but Zárate was “amazed to find so much intelligence in a savage.” Atahualpa had asked for his body to be taken to Quito, but it was buried in a quickly-built church in Cajamarca. It is fascinating how the Spaniards replaced the temples with churches. The chroniclers called the sun-temples “mezquitas”, as if the Incas were Moors or Muslims. Later, Atahualpa’s corpse was possibly smuggled to Quito or dislodged by a huaquero or tomb-raider and has never been found since. The Spaniards were further shocked by many of Atahualpa’s wives pleading to be buried alive with him, as was the custom. This encounter has stimulated countless imaginative reactions in travel accounts, plays, novels and films, from Alexander von Humboldt to Peter Shaffer. Humboldt, for example, followed the same land route along the Andes to Cajamarca, “exposed to the fury of a boisterous wind” as he crossed the magnetic equator. He visited Atahualpa’s residence, surrounded by fruit gardens, and tested the temperature of the baths (156.2°F), but beautiful churches had replaced Inca remains. He was shown the room where Atahualpa was held prisoner for nine months and the mark where he had promised the gold ransom would reach. Locals be85

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lieved that the Inca’s blood stains could still be detected on a stone as he chatted with impoverished descendants of the sun god. Flores Galindo recorded how in 1952 a Bolivian found a manuscript dated 1871 and titled “The Tragedy of Atahualpa’s End”, clearly prolonging an oral tradition. It ends with Pizarro offering the King of Spain Atahualpa’s head. The king is furious: “How did you dare do this! That face you bring me is my own face.” The text closes with Pizarro, “infamous enemy”, sentenced to be burnt alive. This mythic revenge underlines that stubborn link with the past that characterizes upland Peru. Peter Shaffer dramatized this same encounter in his play The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964). An old Spanish soldier opens the piece saying “they’ll bury me out here in Peru, the land I helped ruin as a boy,” adding: “I’m going to tell you how one hundred and sixty-seven men conquered an empire of twenty-four million.” He describes the Andes as a “curtain of stone hung by some giant across your path. Mountains set on mountains: cliffs on cliffs” and freezing cold. He is no admirer of this new land; condors are “filthy” and the Spaniards “a tiny army lost in the creases of the moon.” The crucial moment when Fray Valverde hands Atahualpa the Bible is deftly exaggerated by Shaffer in stage directions: “He smells the book, and then licks it. Finally he throws it down impatiently.” And the play ends: “So fell Peru. We gave her greed, hunger and the cross: three gifts for the civilized life.” If Shaffer’s drama is haunted by 1960s British imperialist guilt, it is just another response in time, such as Sir William Davenant’s operatic play The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (1658) where the English arrive to free Peruvians, or Blair Niles’ novel Day of Immense Sun (1928), in which an Inca shepherd becomes a translator and witnesses Atahualpa’s death. Many a traveller and writer has replayed the scene. The last word on this historic collision comes from the British-born but Canadian travel writer Ronald Wright, who passed through Cajamarca in the 1980s and found that the main plaza was “one of the most delightful in South America”, tranquil and well-preserved. There were no statues, no plaques; it was “as though nothing had happened.” The high puna of Cajamarca, with its talismanic ichu grass and its altitude-induced headaches, seems to have abolished history.

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Chimborazo As we follow the Inca road past Cajamarca into Ecuador, we reach the next landmark, one of the great peaks of the Andes: Chimborazo, which stands at 20,577 feet. Its snow cone is visible in the thin air for hundreds of miles, and it has entered the popular imagination very largely thanks to Alexander von Humboldt. Prescott imagined Chimborazo through a sailor’s eyes, “with its glorious canopy of snow, glittering far above the clouds… a celestial diadem”, but remember, he was blind. H. G. Wells opened his short story “The Country of the Blind” (1904) thus: “Three hundred miles and more from Chimborazo, one hundred from the snows of Cotopaxi, in the wildest wastes of Ecuador’s Andes, there lies the mysterious valley, cut off from the world of men, the Country of the Blind.” To reach this valley meant crossing an icy pass and “frightful gorges” before stepping into its meadows, but then an earthquake closed all entry. Wells had never been to Ecuador, confused its geography, and turned the valley into a parable. The valley he evoked could have been Vilcabamba, known as the Valley of the Immortals, made famous by locals who happily reached one hundred years old, a prototype Macondo which the outer world could not penetrate. On 23 June 1802 Humboldt, his travelling companion Aimé Bonpland and an Ecuadorian friend Carlos Montúfar (later executed by the Spanish as a traitor) tried to climb to the top of Chimborazo and reached a height of 19,286 feet. At that time it was a world record ascent of a mountain thought to be the tallest in the world (in fact there are thirty higher in the Andes alone). Humboldt noted yellow butterflies near the summit, and speculated on the peak’s etymology, conceding: “At all events, whatever may be the etymology of the word Chimborazo, it should be written in the Peruvian manner Chimporazo, as the Peruvians have no ‘b’ in their alphabet” (he meant by Peruvians, the Quechua-speakers). He added that the peak’s name was pre-Quechua, like Cotopaxi, as river and mountain names belong to the most ancient relics of languages. As Humboldt approached the peak, all his Indian porters, bar one, turned back, accusing him of wanting to kill them through lack of oxygen. The intrepid foursome then had to admit defeat after reaching a huge crevasse. They felt sick and giddy and their lips and gums bled, but Humboldt still had instruments with him to ascertain the peak’s geology and its altitude. It was misty and lifeless, and not even condors kept them company. 87

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After mist again smothered the summit he wrote: “We felt as isolated as in a balloon.” But Humboldt was not one to exaggerate the suffering of a climb. Walking back down they were engulfed in a snowstorm. Then, from the plain below and safe, he drew the peak, later had it copied in oil and published it in 1810 in his Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of America. This vision of the snowy peak, the llamas and the cactuses in the foreground and a group of men, one bending to inspect a flower (surely Bonpland) and the other chatting in a group (just as surely Humboldt, a brilliant and incessant talker) is what must have struck his European armchair public. Another of Humboldt’s views of Chimborazo shook the scientific world, and still strikes anyone for its wit and beauty. Chimborazo was drawn as it can be seen, with its different plant zones on the left. On the right of the view the same mountain is covered with graffiti-like plant names in Latin, showing at what height plants grow, so that verticality repeats horizontality, with the mountain peak a kind of terrestrial South Pole. Such was the imaginative impact of Humboldt’s ascent that his revolutionary friend Simón Bolívar, the liberator of half of South America, apparently tried to climb it in 1822, quite literally in Humboldt’s “footsteps”. At the top he had a vision that he titled “Mi delirio sobre el Chimborazo”. An apparition, the “father of the centuries”, showed him the history of the past and his own destiny—to “tell the truth to mankind.” His biographer John Lynch casts doubt on this climb, deeming it more “an exercise in literary imagination”. There are no corroborative accounts, as there had been for Humboldt, and his version of it reads too allegorically. But the point is that Chimborazo lies in the mind’s eye as an allegorical epitome of South America In 1831 the French geologist Jean-Baptiste Boussingault (1802-87) reached Chimborazo’s snow line following Humboldt’s route; he climbed a little higher to 19,698 feet, but could not make it to the top. Only in 1880 did Sir Edward Whymper—already famous for his six attempts to scale the Matterhorn, the last successful in 1865—actually reach Chimborazo’s summit. He found two peaks and glaciers whose existence Humboldt had doubted in the tropics, and thought it unlikely that Humboldt had reached so high or could descend so quickly. Robin Macfarlane labelled Whymper “cantankerous” and “elastic” with the truth. If his narrative of his climbing in the Ecuadorian Andes, Travels amongst the 88

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Great Andes of the Equator (1892), is anything to go by, these are harsh terms. From his account one might call him obsessive, meticulous and long-winded for he listed and noted everything down, except his own private feelings. Whymper was forced to explore Ecuador because of the 1879-83 Peru/Chile war, known as the War of the Pacific, and tested his endurance—researching mountain sickness—and existing estimates of altitude. He was forced to use a map drawn by Charles-Marie de La Condamine from 1751 so little were the Andes then known, even to Ecuadorians. Whymper arrived at Guayaquil in 1879 and immediately noticed that Chimborazo was usually shrouded in mist. He ascended the mountain twice. On his first climb he questioned how high Humboldt had reached as he became “feverish, had intense headaches” and by breathing through his mouth a “parched” throat. Near the summit the wind drove the snow “viciously”. An American writer Blair Niles, with her second husband (the first was William Beebe, the naturalist), visited the town of Riobamba, below Chimborazo, in 1921 and wrote a quaint and honest book titled Casual Wanderings in Ecuador. For her the appeal of Ecuador was “not only the mysteries of the jungle, the grandeur of the Andes, and the lure of adventure, but that it, too, has its ghosts.” She was alert to the haunting presence of the Incas and recreated this eerie atmosphere in forgotten historical novels. Riobamba stood at 9,189 feet and had been rebuilt in 1797 after an earthquake had devastated it, leaving some 40,000 dead. Niles stumbled on a new experience of “complete isolation”, which characterizes many Andean communities, as H. G. Wells had grasped. Chimborazo dominated the little flat-roofed town, packed on market days with cholos and Indians “trotting everywhere”. Trees were rare, and so was shade. They spent days waiting for the clouds to disperse and to take photos of the volcano. On the third day, suddenly, the peak was cloud-free and “dazzling in its white brilliance”. She selected an apposite verb: “it illumined little Riobamba.” In Quito the journalist Negley Farson met a pilot who had flown over Chimborazo in 1936 and claimed that it was the highest mountain on earth, higher than Everest, because it stood on the equator, the broadest part of the earth, and thus furthest from the earth’s centre—making Humboldt right after all. But that kind of fact did not interest Maruja 89

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Torres, who was also in Quito on her train journey up the Americas. In her book Amor América, titled after the first poem in Neruda’s Canto general, she describes the view of Chimborazo from the town as “snow-covered and wide like an Indian woman’s skirt, sending us its freezing wind from glaciers.” Graham Greene knew Walter James Turner’s 1916 poem “Romance” by heart. It ends: “The houses, people, traffic seemed/Thin fading dreams by day, Chimborazo, Cotopaxi/They had stolen my soul away!” The poem asserts that what we read and dream about can be more real than actual, everyday life with the noisy cars of the crowded city. The power of imagination explains Bolívar’s enthused mental ascent, and those of most readers too. It explains, too, the sheer magic of exotic names. But disappointment can lie underneath the evocative, as Christopher Isherwood realized: “You spend your boyhood dreaming of a magic, impossibly distant day when you will cross the equator, when your eyes will behold Quito. And then, in the slow prosaic process of life, that day undramatically dawns—and finds you sleepy, hungry and dull.” Might it be better to read this book than to go there? Probably not, as most of us would prefer to stare at first-hand at Chimborazo’s “cold magnificence” as von Hagen called it, describing it also as a “frigid sentinel” and the greatest spectacle in the western hemisphere, surrounded by a further fifteen snow-covered volcanoes.

Cotopaxi As we walk the Inca road, we reach—say the word aloud—Cotopaxi, at 19,347 feet the highest of all active volcanoes in the world. It was first climbed in 1872 by a Dr. W. Reiss from Berlin and soon after, in 1877, it erupted, generating huge mudflows. Like Chimborazo it owes at least part of its fame to Humboldt who depicted it as “the most dreadful volcano of the kingdom of Quito, and its explosions the most frequent and disastrous”. He listed eruptions in 1738, 1744, 1768 and 1803, when all the perpetual snow melted. He called it a “perfect” cone, the most beautiful and awesome of all the peaks. But he failed to climb it in May 1802 and had to be satisfied sketching and inspecting it with a telescope. He speculated why a protruding rock is called the “Cabeza del Inca” or Inca’s Head (lore had it that it was hurled out of the crater when Atahualpa was executed in Cajamarca) and admitted sketching in smoke to indicate that it was an active volcano, even though he saw none. 90

Cotopaxi: the “ideal volcano”

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Whymper walked up to the peak through thick volcanic dust and camped twenty-six hours on the summit in 1880, describing the “cavernous recesses” belching out smoke. He daringly peered into the crater and saw its molten lava. Every half hour the volcano blew off steam. The next morning his tent was covered in ash and dust. Locals, meanwhile, were convinced that he was hunting for treasure. For Whymper, Cotopaxi was the “ideal volcano. It comports itself, volcanically speaking, in a regular and well-behaved way.” Blair Niles had read both Humboldt and Whymper—like most travellers she had done her library trawl, probably after the actual trip in 1921. She and her husband stayed in the town of Latacunga, just under Cotopaxi, of “terrible fame”. The hotel and much of the village (9,184 feet high) were built of pumice stones. Its name ironically means “land of my choice”, though it was destroyed by Cotopaxi’s eruptions in 1742, in 1768 and again in 1877. They strolled along a path lined by giant cactuses and rows of eucalyptus, with deep volcanic sand covering the plain. She enthused over the cone’s “exquisite symmetry”, observing how it “compels contemplation” (another neat verb, for that is exactly what grandiose mountains do). She also identified the Inca’s Head rock supposedly hurled from the crater when Atahualpa was strangled. As she waited for her husband to place his tripod and camera, she remarked how everything was “profoundly still”. The volcano now stands within the Parque Nacional Cotopaxi, which also includes the Rumiñahui volcano at 15,455 feet, named after an Inca general. When the Spanish advanced on Quito under Benalcázar in 1534, Rumiñahui managed to sack the city as the Spanish had spent four months trekking 400 miles over the Andes from Piura. The Inca general took all Quito’s treasures, Atahualpa’s relatives and 4,000 women, according to Hemming. The Spanish pursued him and finally found him trying to escape across a snow-covered mountain. He was executed in the main plaza in Quito. Hemming describes him as “the last of Atahualpa’s great generals, the leader of the most determined resistance to Spanish invasion.”

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Ecuador Quito and the Volcanoes When Pedro de Alvarado took his men up into the Andes to capture Quito, over sixty of them died of cold. As he rode towards Quito, a “fine warm dust”, in Zárate’s words, from a high volcano covered his men. (And volcanic dust, Whymper wrote much later, penetrates everything.) After crossing the same freezing Andes from the north, on 6 August 1802 Humboldt and Bonpland reached Quito, 9,350 feet up. They were lodged luxuriously in the Marqués de Selvalegre’s (surname Montúfar) town house and found the city very cold, sad and misty. Yet its citizens lived a voluptuous life of idleness, possibly, Humboldt joked, because they lived under the constant threat of earthquakes. In 1868 Quito was indeed devastated by one. He stayed there eight months, to study volcanoes. There are two Quitos, and the older colonial part, with steep, cobbled streets, has not changed much since Humboldt’s sojourn apart from cracks in the walls due to tremors and quakes. Blair Niles found the incredibly narrow streets almost too steep, a city carved into quarters by ravines. Everywhere she heard the “whisper of the past”. A consequence of the conquest of Quito by Pizarro in 1533 was Christianization. There are 86 churches in the city, and the tolling of bells is constant. Sacheverell Sitwell complained in 1961: “Never in any town can there have been such noisy church bells.” The views of volcanoes like Illiniza and Pichincha, the humming birds and the reddish tiled roofs still defy time, but what struck Blair Niles most were the ornate churches, like the San Agustín by her hotel. The Christian religion was fierce in the Spanish colonies and all art was doctrinal. Influences on the local Indian artists were eclectic and even included Moorish doors and windows, but they developed their own sensibilities. Altarpieces were decorated with mirrors because of the Indian fascination with the belief that a mirror trapped the viewer’s soul. By the eighteenth century there was a Quito baroque school, embodying a con93

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tinent-wide horror vacui, evident from Mexican Churrigueresque to Jesuit altars in Paraguayan mission churches. The gaudy, blood-streaked representations of Christ strike everyone. The physicality of suffering is what the Indians learned from their Christian masters and martyrs. Paul Theroux observed a mural depicting hell in the Jesuit La Compañía Church in Quito as school children were brought in to absorb it. Each sin was labelled, and sinners received the relevant punishment; a “shrieking adulteress is being eaten by a wild hog” and a “vain woman wears a necklace of scorpions” (Eve still pays for her sins). Before Christianity the Incas stoned adulterers and were merciless in their punishment of stealing. Theroux translated the Spanish in gold across the top of the mural: “Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” He considered this hell far worse than Dante’s; it was pure Bosch. He also noted that this church was built on top of Atahualpa’s summer palace and that token sun gods can be seen inside. Visual indoctrination was devastatingly effective with the Quechuaspeaking, illiterate Indians. Nevertheless, Catholicism today unites all the Andean republics, especially a sense of devotion and fervour unique to the marginalized. The Indians Theroux watched were venerating Santa Mariana de Jesus, so beautiful, he claims, that she wore a veil to hide her face (lore had it that when a man peeled the veil back he saw a skeleton). She carries a guitar. Theroux continues: ‘The Indians gazed on it; they were small, stout, bandy-legged, with thick black hair, like kindly trolls. They walked bent-over even when they were carrying nothing: it is a carrier’s posture.” In that gesture is a history of subservience. Isherwood noticed the cargadores (porters) everywhere in Quito, under huge loads secured by leather bands around their foreheads. They hurried up the streets “with the dazed single-mindedness of beasts of burden”. The Incas, under Túpac Inca, only conquered and sacked Quito in 1492, but still had time to imprint their urban architecture on the city, linking it to Cuzco with one of their main roads, 1,250 miles long. The city is named after the conquered tribe then living there, the Quitu. But Quito and Ecuador in general have not kept much of an Inca past, unlike Peru. Perhaps the Incas did not have the time to build temples as they consolidated their frontiers. Today’s frontier between Ecuador and Colombia is where Huayna Capac placed the boundary stones marking the northern limits of the Inca empire. Atahualpa so preferred the greenery and 95

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scenery of Quito to the dried, arid tablelands of Cuzco that he built his summer palace there. Five hundred or so years later, Mario Vargas Llosa flew along Peru towards Quito looking down on the “lunar loneliness” of Peru’s dry coast, its leaden monotony explaining for him the character of Peruvian literature. All this suddenly changed as he flew over the sierra. He finds an apt metaphor for the mountain chain seen from a plane: The mountain range is vertical and untamed; its body sharp-pointed and massive like an enormous diluvial monster, with scars and wrinkles. Its energy rises up from the depths of the earth, pierces it and infects the air, electrifying it

He then landed at Quito and, like Atahualpa, was shocked by its violent beauty, with mountains overloaded with vegetation touching the clouds as far as the eye can see. He found the place warlike, virile and revolutionary, surrounded by precipices and “peaks sticking up like giant nails”. The plane had had to fly through this obstacle course of mountains and exuberant forest in order to land. He terms the Andean beauty, common to Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, insolent and turbulent and asks a political question: how could people who share this landscape have become enemies (there was a war in 1941 between Peru and Ecuador, and there is an ongoing border conflict between them over oil in the jungle)? Maruja Torres arrived by train in 1986, along the Avenue of Volcanoes, as Humboldt had baptized it. Quito appeared suddenly with sunlight flashing on its windows. As she strolled around the city, always a good listener and alert to injustice, she found that it smelled of “incense, fried maize and the soft straw of Panama hats”. It was in Quito that Manuela Saénz first met Bolívar, tossing flowers from a balcony when he entered the city on 16 June 1822, thereby vanquishing the Spanish. She was the illegitimate daughter of a Spanish businessman and married the dull English doctor James Thorne in 1817. When she was 22 she re-met Bolívar at a ball and the passionate affair began. She was an excellent fencer and horsewoman and was “politically outspoken” (in Robert Harvey’s words). Later, following Bolívar to Lima, she remained scandalous, kept a pet bear cub and rode around the city in tight red trousers. I find her best encapsulated in a letter she wrote to her cuckolded husband Dr. Thorne: 96

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The English prefer love without pleasure, conversation without grace, and walking slowly; greeting with reverence; getting up and sitting down with care, conversation without laughter. There are divine formalities, but for me, a wretched mortal who laughs even at myself, as well as at you and these English seriousnesses, how badly things would go in heaven!

Manuela Saénz epitomized those quiteños whom Humboldt found indulgently pleasure-loving to the point of outrage. There should be a statue to her. Of course, Quito straddles the equator, hence the country’s name. The sun rises at six and sets at six. It is also a grid or chequerboard city and because of its altitude is never hot or cold, enjoying a continuous spring. But after midday clouds arrive and it rains for an hour, with thunder and lightning. City life stops, people eat and take a siesta and, once the rain is over, return to springtime. Augusto Flores, a young Peruvian who had walked to Quito from Buenos Aires, found the city incredibly noisy. Do sounds increase with height and thin air? A new kind of tourist, the drug-taking backpacker who travels light, haggles, sleeps rough and joins in fiestas as if a native, is epitomized in Mark Mann’s The Gringo Trail (1999). In the book a threesome hit Quito, where the author dispenses guidebook-style insights and advice. They stay in the old part of Quito at the foot of El Panecillo, which is dangerous to walk up to because of muggers. Quito, he tells us, is an easy town to find your way around, an eight-mile strip with peaks on each side. It is full of “Quechua faces”, stinks of “stale piss and dampness” and the steep streets are foul with the black exhaust fumes of the old 1950s US school buses (exhaust fumes plague Latin America, but are worse high up). The three go to the Mama Negra fiesta at Latacunga, dance, get drunk and vomit. Mann writes that “alcohol hits without warning at this altitude.” They visit Otavalo, get lost in the páramo and move on. The text is vivid, like a novel, but none of them speaks Spanish, even less Quechua.

Pichincha Pichincha is the name of a mass of volcanic peaks overlooking Quito, the main ones being snow-covered Rucu-Pichincha at 15,672 feet and the rocky summit of Guagua Pichincha at 8,144 feet. (“Guagua” means baby, 97

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and is commonly used in Chile, while in Cuba it means “bus”). In his poem “Ecuador” Pablo Neruda alluded brilliantly to this mass of rock as “volcano and moon, cold and quartz,/glacial flames, catastrophic/movement, misty/and hurricane patrimony.” On the Guagua summit a monument specifies where Charles-Marie de La Condamine located the precise Equatorial Line in 1735. De La Condamine had come out to Ecuador to prove that the earth was a prolate spheroid—elongated at the poles, rather than what Newton thought, an oblate spheroid, with the poles flattened (Newton turned out to be right). He brought eminent scientists with him (like Jussieu and the Godins) and was tracked by two young Spanish scientists, Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, who wrote their own accounts, one, the Noticias secretas, only published in 1826. De La Condamine was eleven years outside Europe, and returned down the Amazon. According to Goodman, he was the first to bring rubber back to Europe. The testing ground for measuring the earth’s shape was chosen in the plain of Yaqui at over 8,000 feet and the tests were complete by 1743. Humboldt sketched the Pichincha peaks together in 1802. It was the first volcano he tried to climb, but had such a giddy attack that he fainted and had to trek back down. On 26 May he tried again, with an Andean called Aldas. Aldas suddenly sank up to his neck in snow as Humboldt realized—he could see through to the ground far below—that they were on a frail snow bridge overhanging the crater. They found another route up, and managed to peer into the crater, almost a mile wide, as it was being shaken by tremors and issuing flames. Humboldt never flinched from danger, and imperturbability was part of his mystique. It took him eighteen hours to get back down. He climbed a third time, with more instruments and recorded fifteen tremors in thirty-six minutes. He wrote in a letter to the director of the Real Gabinete de Historia in Madrid that Pichincha was the most imposing, melancholic and terrifying spectacle that he had ever imagined. Douglas Botting, his best biographer in English, claimed that Quito’s citizens blamed the heretic Humboldt for the tremors, because he had thrown dynamite down inside. Humboldt also drew a lovely map of Quito and its volcanoes. Pichincha features in Ecuador’s history as the site of a skirmish where General José Antonio de Sucre defeated a small band of Spanish to enter Quito on the 24 May 1822, capturing 2,000 men, 1,700 muskets and fourteen cannons. The same volcano erupted on 7 October 1999, with an 98

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intense rain of ash darkening the streets. Whymper climbed Pichincha’s undulating, grassy slopes on donkey-back. It was such an easy climb for this fearless mountaineer that the mountain merited no respect.

Cayambe, Corazón, Illiniza Humboldt dallied in Quito, checking and sketching the volcanoes surrounding the city. One was Cayambe, the second highest after Chimborazo at 19,355 feet. De La Condamine, who first determined its height, called it Cayambur but Humboldt corrected him, insisting it should be Cayambe-Urcu since urcu in Quechua means mountain; this truncated cone, traversed by the equator, is the “most beautiful”, one of those “eternal monuments”, he said. Whymper found its ascent complicated because of the boggy soil; the whole mountain was “like a saturated sponge”. Corazón derives its name from its heart shape. When in 1738 de La Condamine climbed it among clouds and a freezing wind, he found himself covered with tiny icicles in his eyebrows, beard and clothes. Whymper estimated it at 15,871 feet. Illiniza, at 17,405 feet, was the most “picturesque” Humboldt sketched, with its two pyramidal points—probably, he thought, the wreck of a caved-in volcano. Whymper found it “perpetually shrouded in mist” and never saw the peak during 78 days. When he tried to climb it, he was forced to turn back, “fairly beaten”. These volcanic mountains, with Chimborazo, Cotopaxi and others, form what Humboldt called a chain, one mass in a double or parallel ridge, with the peaks not much higher than the mass. He mentioned how the cone of Javirac, at 10,236 feet, appears like a hill in Quito. Had it been solitary and seen from the sea, it would compare with any peak in the Pyrenees. Humboldt’s marvelling at the mountain landscape in the thin, clear air led him to compare Chimborazo with the majestic dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome produced by Michelangelo, that is, a work of art. Hummingbirds The poet Jorge Carrera Andrade, born in Quito in 1903, titled his 1970 autobiography El volcán y el colibrí, as if volcanoes and hummingbirds epitomized the particular beauty of Quito. The word colibrí itself is as delightful as the tiny bird (it is also known as picaflor, siwar k’enti in Quechua and “flower-kisser” in Brazil). I’ve seen them hovering outside a fifth-floor 99

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flat in Buenos Aires, sucking nectar from balcony flowers. The 330 species are unique to subtropical America, flourishing even high up in the Andes where they have been seen on Cotopaxi at 15,000 feet. Pablo Neruda’s little poem “Hummingbird” seizes the bird’s particular charm as disseminating, from flower to flower “the rainbow’s identity”. John James Audubon, the bird-artist, found the same inevitable metaphor for their beauty as “glittering fragments of the rainbow”. Neruda believed their wings to be “invisible” (they flutter around eighty times a second) and “pure incandescence”, both “static” and “vertiginous” especially when they hover. W. H. Hudson considered them “miracles of energy”. They are pugnacious, and males fight in the air. They are the only birds known to fly backwards, sideways and to hover. Their berry-shaped hearts beat 500 times a minute as they hum and whirr like tops. One is known as the Brown Inca. No wonder Carrera Andrade, a career diplomat, identified with them. Ecuador to him was “mother crowned with ice and hummingbirds”. Perhaps the most glorious hummingbird is the one traced out in the desert and only visible from the air at Nasca, the geometric Colibrí de Nasca, with its long pointed beak. The mystery of the Nasca lines, one of Peru’s great sites, has been attributed to aliens from space, to astronomical predictions and to pathways used for pilgrimage rituals.

Earthquakes The whole chain of the Andes stands on a fault line of seismic activity, producing volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. I was standing at a reception in Mexico City when I felt my first earth tremor, but before I realized what was shaking the building, I fainted. I recovered quickly, puzzled at my reaction. I felt the ground move years later in Santiago de Chile while visiting Braulio Arenas, a surrealist poet, and books fell off his shelf, which he then gave me as a gift. Vargas Llosa imagined that an earthquake voiced a “deep, muffled moan” or “a death rattle of underground rocks” so that one should pray to El Señor de los Temblores (the black Christ in Cuzco). The more conventional advice is to run into the street, or stand under a door frame. On 28 October 1800 Humboldt prepared to observe an eclipse at dawn from the roof of his house in Cumaná, in today’s Venezuela. Storms were building up and a reddish mist covered the sky. The heat was stifling and it began to thunder. There was suddenly a huge flash of lightning fol100

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lowed by two seismic shocks. Everybody ran into the street screaming. Not long before, in December 1797, Cumaná had been razed by a quake. His companion Bonpland was thrown to the floor and Humboldt jerked about in his hammock. He described how slaves were drawing water from a well and heard a noise like artillery fire rise up from it. Then there was a violent gust of wind. That was his first earthquake. Humboldt became so used to such tremors that later in Quito the bramidos or underground rumblings from Pichincha did not even stir him from his bed. By the time he was in Lima “we got as used to earth tremors as sailors do to rough waves.” He distilled his experiences for his European readers: When shocks from an earthquake are felt, and the earth we think of as so stable shakes on its foundations, one second is long enough to destroy long-held illusions. It is like waking painfully from a dream. We think we have been tricked by nature’s seeming stability; we listen for the smallest noise; for the first time we mistrust the very ground we walk on.

While in the Chilean city of Valdivia, Charles Darwin experienced his first earthquake, and seemed to undergo what I suffered: It came on suddenly, and lasted two minutes, but the time appeared much longer. The rocking of the ground was very sensible… There was no difficulty in standing upright, but the motion made me almost giddy; it was something like the movement of a vessel in a little cross-ripple, or still more like that felt by a person skating over thin ice, which bends under the weight of his body. A bad earthquake at once destroys our oldest associations: the earth, the very emblem of solidity, has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over a fluid;—one second of time has created a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would not have produced.

It is clear that this first earthquake taught him something no books could, that what we think of as solid can suddenly become thin and fragile; it was a near-death shock that made him as giddy as if on a rough sea, and we know how Darwin never overcame sea-sickness during his five years on the little Beagle. There is something too about earthquakes and volcanoes that reminds us of our precarious place in the cosmos, for the earth’s core 101

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is molten and magma sixty miles down is extremely hot, at 1500°C. Flora Tristan witnessed her first earthquake while in Arequipa in 1834. It flattened Tacna and Arica and struck Arequipa at six in the morning with a tremor lasting two minutes. Tristan was thrown out of bed, half dreaming that she was still on board ship. The tremors were so strong that both she and her maid had to fling themselves to the ground to stop falling over. Later in the evening a second tremor occurred. She was in her bedroom with her cousin smoking cigaritos when they felt a rumbling. Her cousin screamed and rushed from the room while a crack in the ceiling opened up, letting enormous stones fall down. Tristan was told that there were three or four tremors a day, but she felt “completely shattered”. Arequipa had been nearly destroyed in 1582, 1600, 1687 and 1785. What seems to connect Humboldt, Darwin and Tristan is that nautical analogy, those seismic “waves” and earthquake seasickness. Living with the threat of an earthquake might not be peculiarly Andean, but certainly a fact of life in the region. John Miers, an English chemist travelling with his wife, docked in Buenos Aires in 1819. They crossed the pampas to Mendoza and stayed in an inn. Nobody paid any attention to them until suddenly all the men rushed to the door, bumping into each other and elbowing their way out. Others knelt, made signs of the cross and said the Lord’s Prayer while Miers stared in disbelief. Then they returned to playing monte. Miers realized that a tiny earth tremor, which he had not even felt, had caused them to rush outside. As a Chilean, Neruda was well-used to tremors, but in a poem “Earthquake” he writes of being “woken when dreamland gave way under his bed” (there nothing like being woken from deep sleep for terror). Under the “blind column of ash hovering in the middle of the night” the poet wonders whether he has died. He then questions earthquakes in the scheme of nature: “Why does the earth boil, filling itself with death?” Ciro Alegría defined his native Peru as place of constant earthquakes. Lima had been wrecked three times. There is not a region or city in Peru that has not been ruined or felt the earth’s “trepidations”. Yet Peruvians just rebuild their cities, bury their dead and accept the challenge of earth tremors as part of life. I was in Concepción, Chile, in 1970, interviewing the poet Gonzalo Rojas, and witnessed the destruction left by what had been in 1960 the largest quake ever recorded by a seismograph. 102

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Sangay At 17,159 feet, Sangay (in Quechua it means “the frightener”) is the most active volcano in the Andes, emitting a plume of ash. It lies 155 miles from the sea and is remote, without a road close to it. It was first mapped in 1628 and has been continuously erupting ever since. In 1976 two members of an expedition were killed. This, the most active andesitic volcano in the world, was first climbed in 1929. It is now within a national park and has been a World Heritage Site since 1983. Also within the park are the volcanoes called Tungurahua (meaning “little hell” in Quechua) at 16,452 feet, erupting on and off since 1999 and forcing the inhabitants of the spa town of Baños to abandon home for nearly three months, and El Altar at 17,446 feet. Ingapirca Von Hagen took a car from Cuenca to Cañar, a poor town, passing fields of potatoes in purple flower and half-walking, half-trotting barefoot Indians. At about 11,000 feet they reached the ruins of Ingapirca, which Humboldt had drawn in perfect details. According to von Hagen, this is the only Inca structure still standing in Ecuador, with beautiful stone-work in porphyritic rock. It was built as a barracks sometime between 1450 and

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1485 and has a so-called Temple of the Sun. Part of it looks down a precipice to the Gulan river. Here Huayna Capac heard from runners that two Spanish galleons had been seen at San Juan, in what is today Colombia; it was the beginning of the end.

Quipus The Incas had no alphabetic writing, so even the Inca Atahualpa was illiterate. But they did develop a decimal counting system of knots (quipus) on coloured strings that hung from a two-foot long chord, like a “fringe” said Prescott. It was a mnemonic device that transmitted its recordings accompanied by a verbal message. Specialized decoders called quipu-kamayoc, prompted by the verbal cue (not in the knots), could recite time, genealogies, narrative verse and financial revenues, with gaps signifying zero. It was arithmetic computation based on zero, fractions and a base to ten, but it could not attempt abstract ideas or images. When the Inca died, his poets or amautas decided what memories should be preserved. It is not difficult to grasp how the Spaniards destroyed the meanings in the quipus. First, seventeenth-century priests called them “books of the devil” and had them destroyed; second, the decoders died out in what von Hagen called the “twin disaster to Andean history”. The accounting part has been cracked, but not what is actually meant, leading Hugh Thomson to write of “one of the most tantalising challenges in archaeology”. The Spaniards did have some sixteen quipus translated, but nobody knows which ones because they were not labelled at the time. The 500 surviving quipus remain beautiful and stimulating. In the 1960s the Peruvian poet and experimental painter Jorge Eduardo Eielson developed the quipu into works of taut knots and stunning colours with a purely visual impact, without meaning.

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Ecuador Fear and Loathing in the Sierra Ecuador became the shrunken country it is today in 1942 after losing twothirds of its Amazonian territory in war with Peru. Its divided sense of itself is based on the conflict between the tropical coast and the Andean highlands, embodied in the two cities of Guayaquil and Quito, which were finally joined by rail in 1908, reducing what had been an arduous twentyday journey to a matter of hours. Like the rest of Latin America, Ecuador is becoming more and more urban, and its cold highlands increasingly unfamiliar to the lowland majority. Ecuadorian writing about the inhospitable Andean hinterlands can appear as exotic to local urban readers as it does to foreigners. The literary network—bookshops, critics, universities, publishers, readers—is worlds apart from the realities of existence in the mountains, and for most who are part of this network, reading is their main way of imagining what seems the anachronistic, fading ways of Andean life.

The Andes Imagined (5): Jorge Icaza’s HUASIPUNGO Huasipungo, Jorge Icaza’s (1906-78) first and most famous novel, published in 1934, is set in a highland valley, around a hacienda run by a weak Quito-based landowner with a pregnant daughter (under no circumstances will he consent to her marrying her cholo). So he takes his family to the farm to escape loss of public face. He also goes to make some money by building a road so that a US company can extract hardwoods from the forests. Alfonso Pereira is a representative man, a thoroughly unpleasant, unfeeling member of the white city elite, the misnamed gente decente. Racism lies at the heart of this provocative novel, and the landowner wins, builds his road and sells to the gringos while the indigenous Andeans are murdered by the army. If one reads this novel as “literature” there are obvious defects, not least stock characters and little psychological penetration; but if read as a 105

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window into a certain historical Andean reality it is plausible and packed with detail. There are scenes, for instance, that will make any reader retch. The main Indian character’s foot is sliced into by his machete, for instance. His companions staunch the blood by packing mud on to it, while another finds a handful of cobwebs, but it becomes infected and gives him fever. The witchdoctor is called and diagnoses that he is bewitched. He then sucks out all the rotten flesh and maggots as the man screams with pain, a sign that the devil is leaving him. He is cured, but left a cripple. Another scene features the village priest in the cemetery, where the Indian, Andrés Chiliquinga, is hoping to bury his “wife”, Cunshi. The priest, a “landowner” of souls, divides his cemetery up according to the racist structure of Ecuador: plots near the church are expensive but occupants get to heaven; plots further off are reasonable but their occupants remain in purgatory; and plots at the edges, covered in weeds and nettles, are for the poor and they go to hell. A third episode involves the digging up in the dark of a putrid ox, buried by the boss so that his Indians cannot eat it, though he refuses to give them any thing else. Eating this rotting flesh leads to Cunshi’s death (she had wet nursed the boss’ daughter’s illegitimate baby and had been raped by him). Such scenes are effective in arousing our “repugnance”, an almost physical sensation of disgust that distances the reader from the Andean characters so that we, in turn, become armchair racists. How about, for example, this brew given to the Andeans to fortify them?: “rum made of blackberries, small dose of pregnant woman’s urine, some drops of lemon juice and crushed cuy excrement.” (Cuy is Quechua for guinea-pig, a common Andean delicacy.) There is more that is revolting in Icaza’s Andean dystopia, from the stench of eucalyptus and dried dung in the village and the fleas, lice and bedbugs infesting the homes, to the deformed feet, with calloused, swollen toes and the skinny dogs. There is little romance when Chiliquinga and Cunshi have sex (they are not yet married, living together in a local arrangement called amaño). In a deliberately detailed scene he first beats her up for not being at home when he returns. Her complaining body palpitates with “tender resent” while he, intoxicated with anger and machismo, semi-rapes her. Susan Kellog confirms that such “Andean love” or “spousal abuse” is still tolerated and endemic, linked to binge drinking and constant physical punishment. 107

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Names in fiction are rarely innocent and betray identities. The dissonant surnames that Icaza chooses combine Christian name with Inca surname, just as place names indicate origins. It reminds me of César Dávila Andrade’s poem “Bulletin and Elegy for the Mitas” (1957), which lists names and places, forcing you to mouth them in their untranslatable oddity: I am Juan Atampun, Blas Llaguarcos, Bernabé Ladña, Andrés Chabla, Isidro Guamancela, Pablo Pumacari, Marcos Lema, Gaspar Tomayco, Sebastián Caxicondor. I was born and died in Chorlavi, Chamanl, Tanlagua, Niebli. Yes, I died in pain in Chisingue, Naxiche, Guambayna, Paolo, Cotopilaló. I sweated blood in Caxaji, Quinchirama, in Cicalpa, Licto y Conrogal.

The novel also reveals the terrible isolation of a mountain community as a clue to Andean reality, what essayist Fernando Chaves called “islandism”. He claimed a special psychology for Andean people, hemmed in by peaks, suspicious of outsiders, kicked out from their ancestral land and abandoned by the gods and white society. Life in Icaza’s novel is castebound, with the Indians at the bottom of the hierarchy in their hillside huts (huasipungos), which do not even belong to them. They are pressganged into a minga, unpaid hard labour building a road, a system that merely perpetuates the Inca mita. The forced labour of the mita has been singled out as the most graphic form of suffering in the Andes. The Peruvian Manuel González Prada, the earliest and most eloquent of the apologists for the downtrodden Andean peasants, wrote a poem titled “El mitayo”: The cruel law of the whites Throws me from my home: I go to work and to hunger I go to the fatal mita…

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their indigenous “inferiors”. These two castes or classes both mix and divide, and much of the novel evokes the resulting culture of racism through words and dialogues. Swear-words abound in the dialect of Spanish and Quechua, like “caraju” (“o” is replaced by “u”), which caused outrage in 1934 when the novel was first published in Quito. (There is a glossary for respectable Spanish readers.) The pejorative terms for Indians abound, from runa (meaning “man” in Quechua, according to María Jaramillo de Libensky) to rosca, longo, guarmi and just indio. The novel suggests that the Indians are alien because nobody really understands what they say or think. They hang on to superstitions through their “witchdoctors”; they wash a dead body by the stream in a ritual called jachimayshay, a word hard to pronounce in Spanish. We are led to believe that we cannot penetrate their minds for they do not “think” (in pre-LéviStraussian terms). Icaza refers to their “mutism”, their thinking as “feelings, voices, desires all knotted in their throats”. Yet they do induce panic in the mind of the boss, who alone at night in his hacienda house recalls local revenge stories. They made Víctor Lemus, owner of Tumbamishqui, walk on a splintery path after peeling the skin off his hands and feet; they pushed Jorge Mendieta into a vat of boiling honey. These grimly surrealist acts of revenge are reminiscent of Sendero Luminoso’s propaganda tactics, like hanging dogs from lampposts. The novel successfully recreates the landowners’ fears in the reader. But what it also hints at is how the Andean landscape contributes to the character of those who live on the hillsides in the huasipungos. We learn of the eternal, freezing wind, of the silence and of the “shadows of the high peaks that shut them in [acorralan].” They speak as a community, like a Greek tragic chorus, and remain anonymous, collective, beyond western psychology, as they stay up at night in their ponchos, immobile like “millennial stones”. The imposing indifference of the Andean mountains, the cold winds, the isolation and the timelessness seem to seep into them. At the end they rise up and kill, guided by “an ancestral scream” and by their “deep attachment to a plot of land”. The novel concludes by blending “the freezing winds of the American páramos” into the Quechua battle cry ñucanchi huasipungo (literally “our plots of land”). In a census of 1954, twenty years after the novel was published, there were 19,665 huasipungos inhabited by debt-tied Indians. The system was finally abolished in 1964. 109

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Paul Theroux met Jorge Icaza in Quito, just before he died in 1978 on his return from being ambassador in Moscow (before that he had run a bookshop). He told Theroux that he never intended to write a European-style novel, and had invented an idiom to capture Andean Indianness. It recalled the Mexican Juan Rulfo who also concocted the way his Jalisco hillbilly outcasts spoke Spanish so successfully that readers took it as true peasant-talk. I see what Jorge Enrique Adoum means when he mocks the literary Ecuadorian Indian: “The Indian, a wretch converted into a literary archetype: he did not aspire to such an honour and would have been happy to have simply been a person.” Icaza had trained to be a doctor but dropped out, married a famous actress and lived in Quito; he knew about mountain village life from an uncle’s hacienda in the sierra in Riobamba and from just strolling around Quito’s streets. Negley Farson was less interested in the snow peaks and black volcanic sands than in what struck him as “that sullen, squat enigma of the landscape—the Indian of the Andes”. As he drove between Bogotá and Quito in 1935, he saw countless Indians in Panama hats and ponchos, always trotting along. Their bare legs were “grotesquely short”, their calves like round knobs and they did not even wear sandals and had toes the thickness of bananas. In Popayán he became aware that they always kept to themselves, their faces “completely blank masks”. He was also shocked at the feudal, debt-bondage system, the huasipungo, referring to the serfs of the Andes. Their “sadness hangs like a mist in the valleys of the Andes,” he wrote. The landowner owned their fate as they farmed a small piece of land in exchange for free labour, could be sold with the estates, and had to buy everything from the estate stores so they remained in debt. The justification of the system given to Farson was that if the Indian was given a proper wage he would spend it all on chicha. He was aware as a “sensitive foreigner” that “four hundred years of misrule have filled the Indian with suspicion.” He noted how tenaciously indigenous communities clung to their native dress and how their skills in carrying heavy loads had replaced the horse. No wonder, he thought, they chewed coca leaves with lime to “deaden thought and pain.” He suddenly realized that “you never hear an Indian child cry” and that this silence “drenches the Andes.” In Colombia a landowner had pointed up to the blue Andes peaks and said to Farson: “They live up there, the Indians in another world” and told him he had once asked a chief if he could teach him their language. “‘Why should I?’ he asked. ‘Then you will 110

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know our secrets.’” In that anecdote lies a kernel of truth about what outsiders see as the Andean Indians’ enigmatic strangeness, their protective withdrawal from urban white curiosity into their own language.

The Andes Imagined (6): Henri Michaux’s ECUADOR The Belgian-born poet and later painter and drug-explorer, Henri Michaux (1899-1984), lived for thirteen months in Ecuador, part in the Andes and part in the jungle. In 1925 he met the Ecuadorian poet Alfredo Gangotena in Paris, who penned his avant-garde poems in French, like the Chilean Vicente Huidobro. Gangotena, a haemophiliac, invited Michaux out to exotic Ecuador. On 28 December 1927 the two left Europe with friends Paul Bar, a painter and an art marchand Arum Mouradian (who barely appear in the text) and reached Quito a month later, via the Panama Canal. As a Belgian Michaux was an outsider in Paris, had studied to be a doctor and then became a sailor, travelling to Brazil and Buenos Aires between 1919 and 1921. He was bald and had a lesion in his heart, and much of his writing can be seen as an inner war with his sick body, that “inner space”. He always refused to be photographed and resisted self-promotion. His travel book, Ecuador (1929) counters travel writing’s descriptive realism. He borrowed a notion of spontaneous writing from the surrealists and wrote as he spoke. His attitudes are always unexpected, even original. Michaux’s first impressions of Quito involved its indigenous inhabitants, who were squat, “brachycephalic”, taking tiny steps under heavy loads in a town that lay in a “crater of clouds”. Four months later at Otavalo he evoked Andean dances, drunken orgies and colourful ponchos, but not one Indian showed any joy. A man informed him that the only people who smile are those who have never known white oppression. The mountains form his second impression; they “fall” on those who live among them, shock them and silence their tongue. Later, he accuses the Imbabura volcano (at 15,132 feet, sometimes called “Taita” or Father Imbabura) of “humiliating” the San Pablo lake. Everybody, he observed, smoked the opium of high altitude, spoke in low voices, took small steps and lived constantly out of breath. Neither dogs nor children were disobedient, and nobody laughed. He made a list of what was missing in Quito: cats, ants, wooden barrows, trees, except for “leprous” eucalyptus and cactus, and the sound of wheels. 111

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Michaux travelled two hours by horse to a farm at the foot of the Tungurahua volcano (16,469 feet) and then drove along “chocolate” rivers down into the tropics. Back in town, he ranted against all cities as “safes” cemented on to the ground, with more and more safes inside, each room a safe. Quito, locked into mountains, suffocated him. He read a letter from Europe praising the “poetry” of the Indians, but Michaux claimed to detest them, refusing to be the “amateur of exoticism”. An Indian, he thought, was just another human being, there were no saints and nobody in Quito helped him on his path to perfection. He himself yearned to become a saint, read sacred texts and later took mescaline to find an inner god. In Ecuador, he noted, man is nothing, while the mountains number ten and clouds a thousand, “gulping” the horizon, of every imaginable colour and suddenly disappearing. After almost a year he climbed Atacatzho, at 14,878 feet, despite his heart condition and a formidable wind, and viewed the crater. He then climbed 15,871-foot Corazón, thinking only about ascending Cotopaxi. After pages on tropical Ecuador the “journal de voyage” ends with some set pieces. The first is on the Indians’ huts, which, without windows, burst with smoke as nothing penetrates from the outside. Their music, played on pan-like flutes, repeats a musical phrase and says more about them than anything else. Then Michaux comments on drunkenness as a path to self-knowledge, remarking that during three-week drunken orgies the Indians never try to be happy or agile like whites. They rather attack the drink, wanting to be defeated by drunkenness. That, he concluded, is a form of veiled wisdom, exorcising the ego, the self.

Pumas One of the great symbols of Andean identity, the puma, felis concolor, has been worshipped as a feline god throughout the Americas, its power and presence assuring it of early religious cult status. Classic Tiahuanaco pottery’s most characteristic design was the profile of a puma, a Quechua word that passed into English. Charles Darwin called it the “South American lion” as it ranged the entire continent, down to Tierra del Fuego. He saw its footprints 10,000 feet up in the Andes. He heard that it rarely attacked humans, and that if it did it always sprang onto its victim’s shoulders. This very silent animal was easily killed. One evening at supper Darwin was “struck with horror” when told that he had just eaten puma meat; it was very white, like veal. 112

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Lady Florence Dixie went hunting in Patagonia with Lord Queensbury and Lord James Douglas, as well as two of her brothers. They came across a “mighty yellow puma”, their horses “quivering with fright”. When surrounded, it lay down, eyeing the hunters with “dogged hate”, but it was cowardly, did not attack them and was shot. The party later shot an enormous “cordillera” puma, which was quickly skinned: its nine-foot hide, she later wrote, “adorns the floor of the room where I am at present writing.” The Quechua poet Kilko Waraka (or Andrés Alencastre) links the puma to Andean stone as it crawls up into the snow, its eyes dissolving the mist and its tail wrapping around the mountains: “Beautiful son of the gods/Inca totem,” the poet implores, “rip open my heart, rest on my chest, let me sleep so that I do not suffer anymore. Becoming one with the puma is to share its power, the claws that break rocks.” In Inca mythology the puma is the sun’s nocturnal form. As Ronald Wright attests, the ground plan of the city of Cuzco is shaped like a puma when seen or imagined from the air. The head of the beast is the Sacsayhuamán fortress above the city, with its back the canalized Tulluayu river and its underbelly the Watanay river, which meet to form its tail. Norman Lewis was in the Bolivian Andes when he heard of a tombrobber or huaquero who had found treasure on an island on Lake Titicaca. He drove to Suma, at about 14,000 feet, a cluster of huts under the Sierra de la Muñecas, but there was a fiesta in progress. Finally, the nervous and elusive tomb thief produced his find, a foot-long ceramic jaguar. Lewis’ heart thumped: “It was a moment that provided one of the great surprises of my life,” for he was sure that this jaguar was Mayan. Yet he could not persuade the thief to part with it and was left with the enigma of how a Mayan artefact reached Aymara Bolivia.

Trains and Roads Crossing the Andes has always meant building bridges, roads and, more recently, railways. In 1934 a recently-married Victor Wolfgang von Hagen, a naturalist and prolific publicist of Latin America, reached Ecuador by boat to visit Chimborazo and the Galapagos Islands. Before the railway had been built from the tropical disease-ridden coast at Durán, across the river from Guayaquil, to Quito 290 miles away, the journey on horseback had taken eight days. Then the American Harman brothers (Archer and 113

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John) built their track, switchbacking up the Nariz del Diablo after the Chan Chan river gorge. Work had begun in 1897 and was completed in 1908 in what was a great feat of railway engineering (until suspended in 1983 and again in 1998). It climbed 10,626 feet in fifty miles and reached a pass at 11,841 feet, which von Hagen likened to the tundra in its bleakness, before descending to the Quito plateau. Theroux had wanted to ride this train, but it was overbooked. Another railway engineering feat is the pass at Ticlio, on the line from Lima to Tarma in Peru, the highest railway pass in the world built above the Rimac gorge by the “indefatigable” and “unscrupulous” New Yorkborn Henry Meiggs (actually at 15,865 feet). According to Wright, over 7,000 Andean and Chinese labourers died in building a railway that has 66 tunnels, 59 bridges and 22 switchbacks. You can ask for oxygen masks on the train that now runs from Arequipa to Puno on Lake Titicaca, where the station of Crucero Alto is 14,688 feet high. The 1925 South American Handbook warned that soroche or mountain sickness was “usually the penalty of constipation”. Paul Theroux felt dizzy and sweated up this line, and the “astonishing” beauty of the landscape from the train window was ruined. Then a molar ached. He later learned that blocked air in a filling creates pressure on the nerve: “it is agony,” he wrote. Then passengers started vomiting, until balloons filled with oxygen were handed around before they passed through the highest railway tunnel in the world. As a train enthusiast, Theroux marvelled at the engineering, supervised by Meiggs between 1870 and 1877 the year he died, but surveyed by a Peruvian called Ernesto Malinowski. There is a Mount Meiggs near Ticlio. Another gringo, Dr. Renwick, took a train from Arequipa to Cuzco, spotting the extinct volcano of Vilcanto at 17,000 feet, “one of the best known in all Peru”, and nearby Ausangate, towering over all others at 20,000 feet and visible a hundred miles away. He acutely remarked that Peruvians were so accustomed to these mountain giants seen from the train that they hardly noticed a peak like Huascarán, which “anywhere else would fill the mind with astonishment.” He is still right. In the 1930s trains, rather than buses like today, were the means of travel, but because of the Andean topography, it was a slow business. The train from Trujillo to Huanachuco across dreary landscapes took fourteen hours to cover 124 miles. The train from Chimbote on the coast to Huallanca, a stretch of 86 miles, took 9½ hours. Renwick warned his English 114

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armchair reader: “let the scoffer remember the nature of this ascent and then marvel that the railway is there at all.” If railways have largely dropped out of non-tourist business, the roads have taken over. Long-distance buses crisscross the Andes, and being a window seat passenger is like sitting in a big dipper (or “Russian mountain” in Spanish). There are constant accidents, and wrecks litter the deep ravines. Roads, as all travellers have noted, are subject to landslides with traffic jams and hours of waiting. How the roads slice into Andean cliffs was a source of marvel to geologist Simon Lamb in his research trips to the Bolivian Andes in the 1990s. He called the road across the eastern cordilleras to Cochabama a “remarkable feat of engineering”. It runs eastwest and climbs to 15,000 feet, partly as dirt track, partly tarred. It was during this road trip that he started to unravel clues as to how the steeply tilted Andes were rising. The conditions on most roads in Bolivia are so poor that only fourwheel drive vehicles can cope. In fact, a reason for the progressive abandonment of the altiplano is the way in which roads are slowly being destroyed by lorries. Lamb observed how towns were becoming “virtual 115

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islands” as ordinary cars hardly ever left them. Travelling is slow, at most twenty miles an hour, “a test of endurance as the vehicle lurched from one pothole to another, wallowing in thick mud of powdery dust.” Eric Lawlor spent some three months in Bolivia in the 1980s, fulfilling a prophecy from having said “Bolivia” as his first word as a child He noticed what all bus-travellers have experienced: packed, overcrowded buses, with people scrapping for a seat. “Bus drivers”, he perceptively remarked, “have enormous moral authority in Bolivia”; they are like folk heroes, for without them—and lorry drivers—there would be neither travel nor commerce in the country. The bus driver overcomes geographic barriers, is a modernizer, integrating the country and fostering a sense of Bolivian identity.

The Andean Diet: Potatoes, CHICHA and Maize The truism of being what you eat leads us into the Andean diet. Agustín de Zárate gave an early description of the novelty known as the potato, latinized as solanum tuberosum. When Hernando Pizarro was conquering the province of Collao, which was too high and cold for growing maize, the Spanish noticed that the Indians there lived off a root “which has the shape and something of the taste of truffles.” The Inca Garcilaso called it the papa and said that its flour made a staple bread. He also mentioned another variety that the Spanish called batata or sweet potato, not from the same family and not Andean, which led to the misnomers in Spain and England of patatas and potatoes. (In South America potatoes remain firmly papas.) He listed their colours: white, red, yellow, purple. In fact, there are over 187 wild species of this underground tuber (and some 4,200 varieties known today). The worst tasting, Garcilaso oddly argued, were taken to Spain. The Elizabethan herbalist John Gerard called them “Virginian Potato” and found them wholesome, roasted in embers or just boiled and eaten with oil. Other early eaters like Gómara, the Spanish chronicler, compared potatoes to cooked chestnuts. The patron saint of potatoes for the Incas was Axomama, daughter of Pachamama. The journey of the potato from Lake Titicaca some 7,000 years ago to become an Inca staple on mountainous terraces was slow and largely due to guano fertilizers. Once discovered, however, it spread rapidly to Europe. By 1572 potatoes were part of the diet of the poor in Seville, and by 1655 they had reached India. In Europe, Crosby notes, potatoes were first be116

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lieved to be aphrodisiacs and Shakespeare’s Falstaff, in a bout of passion, exclaims “Let the sky rain potatoes.” A disease named late blight caused the potato famine in Ireland from 1845 to 1852 halved the population and led to emigration on a massive scale—including my family landing in Mauritius. Potato is now the third most eaten crop in the world after rice and wheat. Gordon Meyer realized in Sucre that all Andean food is built around the potato, from the soup with chuño to the purée of starters and potatoes accompanying the main course, and that there are all colours from “white through yellow to ash-grey and charcoal”. High up in the administrative capital of Bolivia, Sucre, potatoes took far longer to boil than lower down. The way chuño is prepared is uniquely Andean. Small potatoes are placed out-of-doors high up where it freezes at night, are then soaked in streams and then dried in the sun. After being trampled on bare-foot, they are stored as a kind of mash for years, overcoming the potato’s seasonality and eliminating toxicity. In Henry Shukman’s novel The Lost City (2007), we watch “old barefoot women trampling the tubers into pulp then leaving them as broken white carpets to crystallise in each night’s frost, and crumble in each day’s sun.” A similar freeze-dry method of preserving led to a food called tunta, a white (and slightly tastier) version of chuño, with the Andean Laska and Chaska varieties best. Potatoes are high in Vitamin C (rice and wheat have none) and contain iron, magnesium and potassium. Hemming called them “Peru’s greatest legacy to the world”. As is well known, potatoes can grow on the Andean slopes up to heights of 14,000 feet, where they are low-yielding but frost-resistant. They are also one of the easiest crops to plant, needing only primitive tools like the still-used long stick-like Andean plough, illustrated by Guaman Poma in the 1640s. Curiously, the Inca diet was almost exclusively vegetarian, and perhaps Peruvian claims that their list of domesticated plants is the longest in the world is correct. The year 2008 was the International Year of the Potato, while in Cuzco there is a Potato Park which can be visited. Just as essential an ingredient in Andean life, chicha (or akjga in Aymara and k’usa in Quechua) is a ubiquitous drink of fermented maize, drunk from time immemorial (since the domestication of maize and known in the Chavín civilization) and a cheap home-made brew (it can also be made from quinoa or algarrobo or even apples). It was originally drunk from an aryballus with a pointed base and two little handles, seen 117

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in Guaman Poma’s marvellous drawings. The first Spaniards to arrive in the puna called the brew “maize wine”, and were offered it in gold mugs by Atahualpa when the armies met in Cajamarca. They learned that when Atahualpa had his rival brother killed in Cuzco, he had vowed to drink chicha from his dried skull, its teeth closed and a gold cup inserted inside. Gordon Meyer watched some Indians—usually women, but he does not specify—prepare chicha by inserting small handfuls of maize flour in their mouths, pushing it around inside until soaked with saliva, and then throwing the pulp into a receptacle. Left in the sun to dry out, the substance is washed in hot water, then boiled for twenty-four hours and finally cooled until fermented. This technique has not changed in centuries, and Meyer admitted that he found “it difficult to forget the process.” During his year riding across the Andes in 1931 Tschiffely considered chicha safer than water to drink. He saw a group of men and women in a circle mumbling, their mouths full of maize. They spat these mouthfuls as moco (mucus) added to more maize that had been soaked in water, spread out on the ground, and boiled in large earthenware pots for thirty-six hours. The moco, active with saliva and the enzyme diastase, acts like yeast. Despite these finer points, Tschiffely confessed that “I continued to drink it” (unlike Meyer). According to the chronicler Zárate in 1555, Indians would hire themselves out as chewers of maize, and the colour of chicha depended on whether the maize was red, white or yellow. He recorded too that they buried the juice in jars under the earth for fermentation. Climbing as high as 12,000 feet, C. H. Prodgers found Indian huts flying red flags, a sign that chichi was on sale. Ritual communal drunkenness is a constant of Andean life and history, while chicha is an ever-present feature in the novels of the region. The Indian traveller Concolorcorvo wrote in 1771 that many Indians’ sole objective was to get drunk and that they would sell mules, cows or ploughs just to buy alcohol. Under the Incas chicha was provided free and, according to Icaza’s novel, this custom continued until the 1920s. Chicha was also used to intoxicate sacrificial victims before they died. Even the Inca mummies buried on peaks were offered chicha, poured into the ground. In fact, the drink was considered sacred, and drops were sprinkled towards the sun before imbibing or on to the ground during a burial. Tschiffely noticed that Indians across the Andes spilt some on the ground as a ritual before gulping it down. 118

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Chicha rarely seems to bring happiness. César Vallejo opened a poem of 1918 with the lines: “the chicha finally explodes/into sobs, lust, fistfights;/amidst the odours of urine and pepper” (Clayton Eshleman’s translation). Peter Matthiessen observed chicha drinkers at the Pisca bridge drowning their sorrows in the “thick, pasty maize beer” that made them sadder and more hopeless than before and still “unsmiling”. Chicha is usually drunk in chicherías, humble bars and meeting places in Andean villages and towns, but less common in the cities where they function as “isolated enclaves of Indianness encircled by urban space that remains correspondingly white” (according to Mary Weismantel). A chichera makes the beer. One of these, we saw, was a leader of the rebellious women in Arguedas’ novel Los ríos profundos. In the sociology of the 1930s the chichería was redefined as the “cave of the nation”, where urbanized Andeans could escape alienation and make contact with their birth roots, with, as Mary Weismantel overstates, the chichera as a mother figure. Chicha is also a kind of underground rock music produced by migrant Indians in shanties, the very word itself adopting subversive connotations. Maize or Indian Corn (hence in the United States corn as in cornflakes) can grow at altitudes up to 12,500 feet. Etymologically, the word derives from the Carib language, but in actuality in Argentina it is called choclo from the Quechua. It seems clear to me that its disputed origins may be resolved by recounting how carefully maize is managed. First, no known wild version exists and it is incapable of self-propagation. Second, the Incas’ use of irrigation and fertilizer (guano and/or llama offal) can be contrasted with the Mexican and Mayan dependence on rain (and rain god Tlaloc worship) in their milpas. Thus, though spread all over the Americas as a staple diet, it is in Peru that its cultivation is most sophisticated, even though more varieties are known in Mexico. By the time of Chavín culture in Peru (850-500BC) maize cultivation supported a civilization, and chicha existed as a ritual of alcoholic escape and contact with divinities. Unlike the Mexicans, the Peruvians did not boil maize, but ground the dried kernels to flour. It makes the unleavened bread of the continent, whether in the form of tortillas or arepas or simply corncakes, and enters Andean cuisine as locro and in empanadas. The Inca Garcilaso simply called it “our bread”, but the Elizabethan herbalist John Gerard’s 1597 The Herball or General Historie of Plantes was less enthusiastic: “it 119

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nourisheth but little, and is of a hard and evill digestion, a more convenient food for swine than for man.”

Coca Perhaps even more central than chicha to the Andean mindset is the coca leaf. From sacred leaf offered to the sun to Coca-Cola and cocaine, Erythroxylum coca is a booming commodity. “Mamá Coca” was already a magical narcotic for the Incas, and was controlled by the government. According to the Spanish Zárate, the coca leaf was worth more than gold or emeralds. Bags of coca leaves for the afterlife have been found in tombs, and stone figures from around 3000 BC show a characteristic little bump of coca leaves in their cheeks. The berries are bright red, about the size of holly berries, and grow on a small hardy shrub on steep hills. The plant has been domesticated for so long that the wild version is not known. Young leaves are plucked from the bushes at least three times a year and the plant survives some twenty years. Its alkaloid is processed into cocaine and needs no further description. Coca’s main use in the Andes, however, is as a stimulant, which through chewing with a little lime (the Incas crushed sea shells or burned quinoa as ash), increases endurance, and reduces fatigue and hunger through numbing. The leaves are traditionally carried in a pouch and the unslaked lime in a gourd. Without the chewing of coca leaves Potosí would not have disgorged its silver, nor would the campesinos have walked and trotted such distances along Inca tracks. Rich in calcium, hence preventing fragile bones in old age, it is also good for teeth, according to the Inca Garcilaso, who summarized the leaf ’s appeal: “It satisfies the hungry, gives new strength to the weary, and makes the unhappy forget their sorrows.” Taken as a tisane, it also reduces altitude sickness. Gordon Meyer found it slightly bitter like poor green tea. Henry Shukman more accurately wrote of its “faint bitter taste, a little like spinach, and the tingle in the mouth, then the gradual chilling of the cheek.” Von Hagen correctly decided that “Coca is as old as Peru.” Yet it is banned. I have seen Indian women in their long stiff dresses being searched on a bus and bags of dried leaves confiscated from underneath. The Indians whom Meyer saw had bad breath, pale lips and gums and greenish teeth, with an ugly black mark at the angles of their mouth. Abuse leads to apathy, quivering lips, yellow skin and an average life expectancy 120

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in the Andes of forty years. The Bolivian writer and diplomat Raúl Botelho Gosálvez’s 1941 novel Coca has its protagonist Alvaro survive the Chaco War, become a seeker of gold and have two mistresses, only to succumb to the “vice of coca” until he drowns himself in a river. Even so, the Jesuit Padre Antonio Julián thought that coca should replace tea and coffee among the poor in Europe—after all, it can be harvested four times a year. Perhaps the ritual of the coca leaf is just as crucial as its ingestion. The rite called kintu where the green leaf is held up towards the nearest mountain and “Apu Santo Domingo” is muttered and then the leaf chewed is a communal bond. But coca “chewing” (the leaves are not actually chewed but moistened with saliva) has had its ups and downs. The Incas reserved the plant for royalty, priests and shamans as their monopoly. Then they allowed the people to use it, and most upland villages had their own coca gardens deep in the semi-tropical valleys. (In fact, the higher the plant grows, the stronger its alkaloids.) After the Spanish conquest, the Bishop of Cuzco banned the coca leaf in 1551 as fostering the “illusion of the devil”, but Philip II in 1569 decided that the bitter leaf was not necessarily evil and that Indians should use it (and thus work harder to extract silver from the mines). The nineteenth century witnessed a coca leaf boom largely thanks to a chemist Angelo Mariana and his coca wine (the pope gave him a gold medal). In 1886 John Pemberton included the leaf as an ingredient in his beverage Coca-Cola (the cola nut from Africa is high in caffeine), but in 1903 it was removed. Indeed, Coca-Cola deny using the coca leaf at all, though investigation has shown that a processed liquid from the leaf is still imported into the United States. A 28-year-old Sigmund Freud published a paper on the “magical” leaf in 1884 and took cocaine himself for three years until 1887. Today its magic is less related to its nutrients taken as a tea, than as white powder snorted up the nostrils.

Quinine Loja, one of the oldest towns in Ecuador—founded in 1548—and with a pleasant climate, stands at 7,298 feet. It was there that Charles-Marie de La Condamine said that the best quinquina grew (the word derives from Quechua for “bark”). Quinine was first brought to Europe in 1639 by the Marquesa de Chinchón, the wife of Peru’s viceroy, who had been cured of fever by it. Malaria, meaning “bad airs” in Italian, had many names, as 121

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Hobhouse shows, from ague to swamp fever. The plant’s five-inch leaves have a peculiar reddish colour, easily visible from afar. The Jesuits ground the bark into a powder, hence “Jesuit’s powder” or “countess’ powder”, and controlled the lucrative trade, for only the rich could afford it. In 1739 Linnaeus in Stockholm called it cinchona, and it covers at least twelve species, from a cinchona purpurea from Cuzco to a cinchona succirubra on Chimborazo. Another Andean speciality, it grows no lower than 2,500 feet and no higher than 9,000 feet. Humboldt visited Loja in July 1802 and sought what in his day was called cinchona condaminea. He outlined its history for his European readers explaining how the small tree, with fragrant flowers, was cut by “Quina hunters”. Henry Hobhouse tells the story of how Clement Markham, an “ambitious amateur”, arranged with Kew Gardens and the Indian office to transport plants to Nilgiri in India. He had travelled around Peru between 1852 and 1854, and wrote several books, including Peruvian Bark (1880). By then Peru had already lost its monopoly trade to India and Java. After three hundred years, quinine was displaced in the 1940s by synthetic remedies for malaria but was brought back again in the 1960s. Its defect is that it does not kill off malaria parasites, so fevers return. Tonic water was at first a way for the British in India to ingest quinine, though the amount in the drink is minimal.

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Bolivia/Peru Tiahuanaco, Titicaca and the World’s Highest Capital Streaming along the ancient Inca route from Cuzco to La Paz, tourists and backpackers enter a highland theatre as they cross or pass cold, deep Lake Titicaca and enter Bolivia, or Upper Peru as it was known. They also enter another language zone—that of Aymara—but remain in conquered Inca territory. It was with the Inca Túpac Yupanqui, at the end of the fifteenth century, that the Incas finally dominated the altiplano tribes. They installed their gods on two islands in the lake called Sun and Moon, and proclaimed that the sun-god had emerged from this womb-lake. The pre-existing Tiahuanaco empire was alien to both Aymara survivors and Inca conquerors. In 1548 Cieza de León was told by the Aymara that they had no idea who had built the city that now lies in ruins. Osborne even asserts that they were a people without a history. Keen on astrology and solar calendars, this civilization “has left us only unexplained mysteries,” wrote von Hagen. These people had no writing and the Incas wiped out their oral history and memory to replace it with their own. Even the etymology of Tiahuanaco is unknown. Osborne tells of the legend of a chasqui sent by the Inca who rushed so fast that he was told “Tiay huanacu”, meaning “Sit and rest, guanaco” in Aymara. That this obliterated empire lay at 13,000 feet, worshipped the sun god and cultivated potatoes makes it arguably the original Andean civilization. J. Alden Mason summed up this site well as “bleak, chilly, a practically treeless puna, too high for intensive agriculture, the last place in the world to expect a great stupendous archaeological site.” In his poem “The Puna”, José Santos Chocano stresses the silence and loneliness of the place, with nothing moving on the tableland. He evokes the “sadness of the frozen puna”, without butterflies, birds or flowers, an uninhabited immensity “as if it was a soul without loves.” That sense of abandonment, in a nutshell, is its attraction. 123

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What can also be confirmed of Tiahuanaco is the cult of stone. Its builders shunned adobe for basalt and sandstone from a quarry three miles away. The Gateway of the Sun, an actual doorway standing among a vast rubble of giant blocks, is carved from one massive slab of andesite, weighing forty-four tons. It rivals anything in Machu Picchu, and the stones are fitted just as magically. Copper cramps were used, perhaps, according to Alden Mason, melted into the grooves. In 1932 an American archaeologist found a huge statue in red limestone, later placed in a plaza in La Paz. The Incas, as we have seen, claimed that they originated from Tiahuanaco and had learnt their stone masonry there. The South American liberators arrived in 1825 under General Sucre, who later gave his name to the official capital of Bolivia. Two months later, Simón Bolívar named this new region after himself. During colonial times it had been the Audiencia of Charcas (as the town Sucre was first known). It was crucial to Spain by then because of its mines, specifically the famous Cerro Rico, the most “generous” mountain ever, claimed the Uruguayan essayist Eduardo Galeano. The town of Potosí lies at its foot where silver, discovered in 1545, created a boom town with a population of 120,000 in 1600—the largest city in the world. Apart from its mineral wealth, though, Bolivia was just too high and bleak, with a 70 per cent preponderance of Indians. It lost Antofagasta and access to the Pacific in the 1879-83 War of the Pacific with Chile, had a successful revolution in 1952, became famous for its coca production, witnessed the death of Che Guevara and was the first country in Latin America to elect a fully indigenous president, Evo Morales.

Aymara Language, Babel’s curse, divides the “whites” from indigenous Andeans, with cholos speaking both Spanish and Aymara. In fact, even whites in Bolivia learn some Aymara from their nannies or servants. This is the name given to the language of Bolivia and the bloodthirsty tribes conquered by the Incas, and also to the tribe or nation sometimes called Kolla. This was not, however, what they called themselves; they were haqe, meaning “men”. Tschiffely in his Andean travels found it “the least musical of tongues”, spoken from down in the throat and stomach. The Aymara were famously sullen, associated with constant bloody uprisings and cruelty. As Tschiffely rode along the Andes in 1932 they rarely sold him food as they 125

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had maintained a strong distrust of strangers over centuries. They adored objects of nature as manifestations of Pachacamac, the “Earth Maker”, like the rock on the largest island on Lake Titicaca, called Inti Karka. Despite compiling a small word list the only word Tschiffely really understood was jañua, which meant “there is nothing”. He could have been among the Chinese or Hottentots, he quipped, and he had been advised not to ask politely for food, but to stride into huts and just grab it. (It seems from his account that they did not mind and were surprised when he paid them.) Half a century later, Eric Lawlor described their view of the world as hostile and cruel, filled with demons that ravage crops, kill animals and make men ill, with only magic as an antidote. Harold Osborne noted that Quechua and Aymara shared about thirty per cent of their vocabulary, but otherwise were different languages. When the Incas conquered Lake Titicaca and the altiplano they called the region Kollasuyu, based on the previous Kolla civilization, though now “Kolla” has become a denigrating term for those who inhabit cities. A nineteenthcentury Bolivian patriot, Emeterio Villamil de Rada, once argued that Aymara was the original language of mankind and that the human race originated in Sorata at the foot of Mount Illampú. The first Aymara/Spanish dictionary was published by Ludovico Bertonio in 1612. Today there are some 2.5 million speakers.

Lake Titicaca The statistics about sacred Lago (Lake) Titicaca define how different it is from anywhere else in the world. It is the highest navigable lake in the world at 12,497 feet, is 171 miles long and as deep as 900 feet. It covers some 3,600 square miles. It fills with melting snow and then the water evaporates more rapidly than fresh water is received; this water is saltier than usual, and freezing cold. Its name in Aymara is Inti Karka, the rock on the Island of the Sun, though Inca Garcilaso thought it meant “Lead Mountain”. The lake is transparent, sapphire-like and edged with totora reeds that are used for boats (the Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl’s raft KonTiki was made from these reeds and named after Kon-Tiki Viracocha, the Inca’s creator god, as are all the lake’s fishing boats). The lake has countless reed or floating islands on which indigenous communities live (mostly from tourism). And then there is the wind; Anthony Daniels recalled, “the sharp wind froze us, the sun burnt us.” 126

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Sacred Lake Titicaca

The 1925 South America Handbook mentions a train from Mollendo on the Pacific coast to La Paz. In 1947 Christopher Isherwood took it. It functioned once a week and its buffet car had padded leather seats “like armchairs in a shabby old London club smoking-room”. It arrived at the pier on Lake Titicaca for passengers to board a vessel, in the guidebook’s words, “almost the size of an ocean liner”. That ship was named the Inca, and was built in Hull in 1905, with room for 86 first class passengers. She was carried up into the altiplano piecemeal by train and reassembled on the shore. Years later Isherwood and then Peter Matthiessen travelled in it all night, for the lake crossing was nearly one hundred miles. The oldest boat in service in 1925 was the Yupara, which had been navigating the lake since 1861. From on board the Inca you could catch seventy-five miles of perpetual snow peaks that looked deceptively close. Up so high “everything looks near,” wrote Isherwood, elated by the altitude. When he breathed deeply the air seemed to “possess” him to his very fingertips and he felt demonic, “an inhuman creature riding high above the world of

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cities and men.” Daniels, a travelling doctor, explained this euphoria as a physiological consequence of insufficient oxygen to the brain. But he too succumbed to the lake’s thrall: “Distance hardly reduced our perception of detail. It was as though we had lived the rest of our lives with a filmy substance over our eyes, which the Altiplano had stripped away.” Nowadays there are good roads on both sides of the lake and buses and hydrofoil tours but no more ocean liners. Paul Theroux crossed Lake Titicaca from Puno in Peru (the highest harbour in the world) into Bolivia at night on board the ferry Ollanta. When the sun rose, he saw “the gritty undercrust of the earth, a topography of stony fossils; the topsoil had simply blown away, leaving the country to its old bones.” He commented that “the place could not have looked colder or fiercer.” Theroux then fell ill with soroche in the form of dizziness and shortness of breath. He passed the highest ski resort in the world at Chacaltaya, over 17,000 feet and set up in 1943. It was then very steep, and ended in rocks (although now the glacier is reportedly melting fast). In 1957 Gordon Meyer found himself cooking fish on the shore of this sacred Andean sea, with the veins on his head swelling to bursting and fighting for breath. He recorded that “it is not sensuous here, neither does it welcome.” He spotted an Indian in a boat with a small child and hailed him. They went out rowing together. He noticed that the Indian held the boy over the side and warned him, though the Indian was smiling, murmuring something to the child. Meyer was rowing by then, admiring the view. Suddenly the little boy drifted by, sinking. He pulled him on board in time from the freezing water and lost an oar. A young doctor in Santa Cruz later explained that the Indians hold the lake sacred and believe it must not be denied its victims, and that he had been wrong to save the boy. Meyer also detected a strange sound associated with the lake and thought it could be the sound of clouds. He found it so peaceful and lonely that there was nothing to understand, as he and his third wife stared at the peaks on the same rocks as others had done ten thousand years before. In 1903 C. H. Prodgers, a race-horse trainer living in Chile, went out to report on rubber-tappers on the Challana river in the Bolivian jungle and on his way passed Lake Titicaca. His Adventures in Bolivia (1922) is terse, with practical details such as costs, and no introspection. He was 128

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keen on bird shooting, often eating his prey, with his double-barrel Holland and Holland sixteen bore. His trip began in the Jura spa, the old Inca thermal baths outside Cajamarca, in a bid to lose weight. He then took the train to Puno, passed the highest rail point at Crucero Alto (14,666 feet) and crossed Lake Titicaca. He found the fish he called pejerrey very good to eat, and bathed in the lake “but the water was too cold to remain in long.” On his way to the rubber plantations he climbed the Nevado de Sorata (23,212 feet) above the lake, which, he noted, the eminent mountaineer Sir Martin Conway had failed to climb. (In fact Conway said the peak was unclimbable—in 1892 he held the altitude record for climbing—and the American Annie Smith Peck also failed.) Humboldt had judged it to be the highest mountain in the world. When Conway attempted it, thousands of Indians watched, to be sure that he would not be allowed to remain on top as the Image of the Sun had been taken from there. Today, the mountain is known as Illampu, and Sorata is the name of the village below. It was finally scaled by Hans Pfann and three others in 1928. Reverting to the lake fish, Tony Morrison explained how the Argentine pejerrey entered the lake by swimming up stream from salty Lake Poopó, which had been stocked with the edible Basilichthys bonariensis. The local lake fish are a catfish named suche or mauri and fish from the genus Orestius called boga or carachi. In the 1930s rainbow trout were introduced along with hatcheries and a research laboratory, but over-fishing, mainly through dynamiting, depleted the lake’s stock by the 1960s. (Dynamiting is a Bolivian speciality as so many Bolivians have been miners.) The lakeside is also ornithologically rich, with birds such as the Andean Woodpecker living in holes in the ground in this treeless zone, the Andean Silver Teal or puna duck, the Andean Crested duck, the Andean Caracara and the Andean Coot—I mention only birds with the adjective “Andean” attached. Morrison alludes to one final natural history oddity from the lake and that is the world’s tallest flower, called the puya (puya raimondi, named after a famous explorer of Peru) which reaches over thirty feet in height and takes up to a hundred year to grow. Like some cactuses, it flowers once and dies. It attracts a unique hummingbird to its 8,000 flowers. This desolate but beautiful region is still little known by Bolivia’s literate class, so a writer and later diplomat from La Paz, Raúl Botelho 129

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Gosálvez (1917-2004), set his novel Altiplano (1945) exactly there. The story of an ayllu or community called Jatun-Kolla, north of Lake Titicaca, it opens by revealing how the Indians live their monotonous, agrarian lives, followed by a terrible drought and exile to the mines, a city and the tropical Bolivian Yunga. Then it rains and the survivors return to their bleak adobe huts. Here there are no evil white landlords, and the extreme mountain weather is instead the tyrant. To placate the drought the Indians place ten llama and ten sheep foetuses, the koa herb, coca leaves and lots of rum and sweets on the top of a mountain. This conical cerro is known as the “father” of the community, as streams run down it. In the rough church or iglesuca their patron saint San Isidro Labrador is surrounded by lesser saints on the altar, and a statuette of Ekeko, a pot-bellied god of pleasure and abundance. The freezing winds contribute to the bleakness. Everybody is convinced that mother-earth—Pachamama—is old and ill and will soon die. The novel depicts an Andean landscape that is dramatically active: the yellow, drab plain and the open, hard and dry horizon look like the pupils of a dead man who stares without seeing. To the north, eyes fix on the hunchbacked sphinx of Mount Illampu (Nevado de Sorata), “like a scream of petrified ice whose echo is lost in the vertigo of clouds and stars”, with nothing but snow, ice and emptiness that the villagers consider the end of the world. The author clearly explains to outsiders how hard life is for highland Bolivians. The altiplano is “dried-out earth”, the Andes to the north a “fortified wall”. The villagers might eat fish from Lake Titicaca—with names like hispis, suches, karachis and humantos—but it is the potato, black and floury, that is most essential. This novel is as much anthropology as it is fiction, static, with neither convincing characters nor plot. Botelho Gosálvez unsuccessfully entered the book in 1940 for the prize in Washington that Ciro Alegría won.

Puno Puno, the port on the Peruvian side of Lake Titicaca, has generally had a bad press. John Hopkins in 1973 found it “the most god-awful, coldest, drabbest, most depressing” town that he had ever had the misfortune to be stuck in. Patrick Leigh Fermor summed up its “horrors” as “an assembly of corrugated iron roofs, sidings and goods yards sprawling round a church like a Gothic mud pie. We picked a way through the debris and 130

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squatting Aymara Indians… to a ramshackle lacustrine port.” The oddest foreigner’s account of life on the lake belongs to the inveterate liar and oddball Tristan Jones (1929-95). He boasted that he was born at sea near the island of Tristan da Cunha, but in fact it was in Liverpool to an unmarried mother. He claimed that he joined the Royal Navy in the war and was sunk three times before he was eighteen, but in fact joined up in 1946, with the war over. His book title is thus appropriate, The Incredible Voyage: A Personal Odyssey (1977), with a foreword from John Hemming. Jones often over-writes and obviously exaggerates, but there are photos to support some of his claims and some details could not be invented. In early 1976 he loaded his yacht, the Sea Dart, on to a lorry at Callao in Peru, drove to Arequipa and then over high passes to Lake Titicaca, where he spent eight months roaming the islands, and avoiding the Peruvians as he owed them tax he could not afford. Nothing seemed to disconcert him. The book recounts how he dropped the yacht into the lake at Puno, watched by a crowd of Andeans, “silent, barefoot and very dirty”, who gazed expressionlessly at his boat. The shoreline was a short, broken-down jetty, with miserable adobe huts and an ancient steam-crane. He admits he had no charts for the lake, and at that time “none existed”, so he drew his own (included in the book), measuring the depth and pencilling in coves and islands like a mariner of old on waters “hardly ever travelled by Europeans”. He does not mention that Captain Juan Ladrillero brought a brig up on mules from the coast and sailed the lake in the 1550s. The day he sailed off his yacht became entangled in underwater trees called llachon. He visited Uro Indians on a reed island, starving because storms had washed off the layer of earth they deposit on top of the footdeep reeds. They live, he writes, off duck, pejerreys and potatoes, and eat giant eyeless toads from the lake bottom (do we believe him?). He landed on Taquila Island and climbed up eight hundred feet (that is, 14,200 feet above sea level), with the emerald lake below. He jotted notes about the ruined Inca watch tower, store house and necropolis with skeletons standing up and “human skulls grinning out of tiny windows set in the vertical tombs.” Later, on another island called Quebraya Jones explored another necropolis three storeys high, with vertical tombs and the skeletons all staring east. Jones spent his first night in an Andean hut bitten to death by fleas and bedbugs. Despite soaking his head and pubic hair in 131

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gasoline and shaving, the fleas invaded his boat. He was given a nickname, Macchu Cuito, meaning “thorny bush” because of his Popeye-style beard. Jones’ account is rich in bad smells. The Indians, he remarks, cook with dried llama dung and never wash. Not many travellers have commented on this apparent disregard for hygiene, though Che Guevara watched Indians “regardless of sex or age, do their business by the side of the road, the women wiping themselves with their skirts, the men not at all.” As a doctor and a middle-class Argentine he disapproved of their petticoats as “veritable warehouses of excrement”. Henry Shukman’s own sense of smell came alive when the bus he was travelling in stopped and all the passengers climbed out while he was too ill with a swollen stomach to move: “one after another the women’s skirts brushed over my face. The stench was horrifying: they never have baths.” Tschiffely, high up near the Bolivian border with his two horses, entered a solitary hut with an old Indian inside, but the smell was so repulsive he had to leave every now and then for fresh air. A refined sense of smell can be a symptom of class consciousness and a cultural/sexual phobia, as Mary Weismantel suggests in her essay “Strong Smells”, and it might be argued that not washing could be a means of conserving body warmth, but the smell, rather than the meaning of it, is certain. Jones then sailed into Bolivian waters, and was immediately arrested, but even then appreciated the nights “crammed with stars”. Later, he docked at the Bolivian Yacht Club and met its ex-Nazi members, many survivors of the sinking of the Graf Spee in the battle of the River Plate. And so his adventures piled up, until he loaded his yacht on to another lorry and drove into La Paz. The border with Chile was closed, so he altered his plans and sailed through the Chaco and down the Paraná to Buenos Aires and the open sea. In all, Jones wrote thirteen books around his sea travels, and two novels—they clearly overlap—and died in Thailand in 1995. For a native Bolivian, the thought of Lake Titicaca can trigger off the pain of loss, associated with the disappearance of old religious certainties. Pedro Shimose addresses the lake “reclining in the silence of the puna” along the “white altar of the cordillera”. On its shore that rejects us, he writes, “we perceive the presence of something that’s ours, the chant of blind waves” and “we pronounce forgotten words.” Bolivia to him is “este 132

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país no-país” (this non-country country), alone in its agony, “naked in its high altitudes”.

La Paz In 1938 the Argentine novelist Manuel Mujica Lainez (1910-84), later famous when the Alberto Ginastera opera based on his historical novel Bomarzo (1962) was banned in 1967 by the military dictator General Onganía, travelled by train from Buenos Aires to La Paz, some 1,700 miles in 74 hours. As the slow train crossed the frontier at Villazón, he noticed the yellow, pink and green striations in the bare rocks, with a sudden red peak and more sumptuous purple rocks standing out from the slate mountains. Then he spotted Mount Illimani and La Paz. “Nothing announced its proximity,” he wrote, and there it lay, at their feet, “luxurious in its lights”’, the highest capital in the world, higher than either Lhasa or Mexico City. The shock of arrival defines La Paz, a city lying at the bottom of a cliff in what geologist Simon Lamb calls an “erosional bowl”. When the Spaniards first appeared there was an Indian village called Chuquiapo, but they renamed it Pueblo Nuevo de Nuestra Señora de la Paz, commemorating (the short-lived) reconciliation or peace between Pizarro and Almagro. Tschiffely approached La Paz on horseback from Buenos Aires and could not see the city from the plain until he reached a rim. Then, he stared down at a town below that seemed like a “miniature toy” with quaint churches, steeples and houses and gardens. Carroll K. Michener saw a caravan of llamas suddenly disappear into a “gigantic hole in the ground” and when he looked down he saw “at the bottom, dazzlingly clear in this thin atmosphere, the red-roofed capital of Bolivia.” On the far side, Illimani, at 21,201 feet, glittered and seemed so near he could hit it with a pistol shot. This moment on the cliff edge looking down into La Paz was called “one of the spectacular experiences of South American travel” by Sacheverell Sitwell. His first sensation was one of bewilderment at so large a city in the middle of nowhere as the train descended the “trumpetshaped” valley in curves. The approach to this strange city remains the same today as you look down from the surrounding heights into a city in a bowl. The difference today is the spreading shantytown of El Alto, a place that shocked Michael Jacobs with its chaotic traffic and tin-roofed adobe shacks where Indians 133

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from the hinterlands continue to arrive. El Alto airport, at 13,500 feet, is one of the highest airports in the world. Planes need extra fuel and a much longer runway than usual to lift off. The cliff edge was occupied in March 1781 by 80,000 rebellious Aymara under Julián Apasa, a semi-literate Indian from Ayoayo who adopted the name of Tupaj Catari. His siege reduced the city to starvation as his men shot arrows into the streets far below, and he even tried to flood it by damming and then releasing water from nearby rivers. He was finally betrayed and caught in October and in November 1782 he was drawn and quartered in Peñas, and his head severed. Harold Osborne adds that the “memory of this siege still survives as a feeling of unconfessed insecurity among the white rulers of Bolivia.” The Bolivian lawyer and historian Augusto Guzmán, the author of over 44 books, wrote a historical novel Túpaj Katari (1944), about this siege and thus reinforced white fears. Down inside the city Tschiffely roamed the markets as colourfully dressed and lively Indians bartered the most “extraordinary things” like dried starfish and skinned and dried squirrels. He found the city a peculiar mixture of neglected colonial style and modern buildings. Sitwell, learned and worldly in seeking out churches, recognized after visiting La Paz that markets in the Andes—and all over Latin America—should have another name, a collective noun, for they are “among the most picturesque scenes left in the world today” (he was writing in 1961). Eric Lawlor took an oblique view of market Indians in La Paz: “To be frank, market women unnerved me.” He accidentally kicked over a pail of flavoured water, saw the woman’s glare and fled. He added that Indian women are Bolivia’s main traders, but in an odd way: “They view the world with a detachment approaching insensibility and seem not so much indifferent to one’s presence as oblivious to it,” joking: “It must take them an age to dress.” In what he likened to scenes of medieval filth, he witnessed some 20,000 vendors selling everything “from shrunken heads to dried embryos”. Theroux did not stay long in La Paz and took the train to Buenos Aires. As it circled up out of La Paz, he could not help noticing Illimani, a “dark brutal bulk surmounted by wind-swept snow.” Nearing the Bolivian border with Argentina, he made this telling point: “The Andes, people call them; but the name means nothing. It seems remarkable to me that mountains so huge and snowy should have such a general name and not 134

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be known by individual names.” He was doubtless thinking of the thousand square miles of plateau shrunk to puna or altiplano which even maps leave blank. The reason for the gaps in the maps is, of course, the sheer size of the Andes compared with, say, Switzerland, where every crag has a name and a history. From the cultural viewpoint of the British Ordinance Survey map, Latin America remains extraordinarily vague. Patrick Leigh Fermor saw the Andes as “totally uninhabited and largely unnamed”. In our overcrowded urban and signposted world, it is perhaps a relief to go to a place beyond names. Illimani dominates the city, but in special ways, as most of the time it is covered by rain clouds. Its fleeting appearance is as dramatic, wrote Gordon Meyer, “as the fall of a bomb or the first sight of a new-risen volcano. It is as though one had left the city, to arrive in another never yet heard of.” Maruja Torres took a train into La Paz from the south, the temperature at - 15°C as she passed the highest railway station in the world, inevitably called Estación Cóndor. She calls the city a poem of stone and air, built spontaneously according to relativity theory. Then she had her fortune told by a yatiri or folk doctor, casting coca leaves on a rug on the floor of her shop. Indians crowded the streets and cholas spread their wares on the pavement, as they do in all Latin American cities. Thanks to the shanties (pueblos jóvenes), once white La Paz, she concluded, is becoming more and more Andeanized. Andrés Alencastre’s Quechua poem “Illimani” imagines the peak as “great god,/snow fort, made with stone bones”, which the poet “salutes every dawn.” The streams that burst down are the god’s tears, twisting like silver snakes, pronouncing the god’s name with a din of uncertain voices. This mountain-peak god put light in ancient men and gave them strength. His three needle peaks let condors rest and in his impenetrable heart of rock pumas are born. The poem ends on a prophetic revolutionary call: a river of blood will flow through the earth. La Paz reverses the usual social pyramid where the rich live at the top, for here the wealthy have colonized the bottom. Above the city, on the rim in El Alto and Villa Victoria, live the poor, in Isherwood’s phrase filling “terrace upon terrace of crude adobe houses”. Then comes the zone of the cholos, comprising solid if modest buildings, then the high-rise business sector and finally the wealthy residential zone down in La Florida and Calacoto, and in Obraje in the valley bed. C. H. Prodgers, staying in the 136

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Grand Hotel Guibert in 1903, claimed that in the valley bed river “many large nuggets of gold have been found,” and that La Paz is built on a “gold mountain”. The lack of oxygen means that fire hazards are few; indeed, Isherwood bantered, “La Paz is the only capital city in the western world which has no official fire department.” But he was wrong. Eric Lawlor spotted firemen in blue overalls and red tin helmets, while agreeing that the rarefied air means that fires hardly burn. Lawlor’s is perhaps the wittiest and most positive account of living in La Paz. He recommends the plaza as the place to engage with locals, especially the old. He was so hounded by shoeshine boys that he took his shoes off and walked barefoot. Not much of colonial La Paz remains and most buildings have corrugated tin roofs. It is an ugly city, writes Theroux, and it drizzles continuously, but he liked it and the paceños with their “heavy dignified faces” even if everybody stayed indoors because of the cold and the streets were empty. Isherwood, like most passers-by, suffered from the altitude, constantly out of breath and envying the locals their enormous lungs. At night he woke up in his hotel “suddenly breathless” with palpitations, gasping for air and a struck by “causeless anxiety”. He thought the city’s mood was “mournful”, despite the permanent splendour of Illimani, and had a troubling vision that reiterates the Inkarrí myth of Inca return: “I imagine the Indians sitting around the rim of the plateau and looking down at it like condors, waiting for it to die.” Like everywhere in the Andean puna he sensed that racial hatred was worse than ever as the Indians remained inscrutable to travellers and the local upper and cholo classes. Daniels discovered that Andean women were obliged to wear a bowler hat by Charles II after Túpac Amaru’s rebellion (but not why it was a bowler hat). The sixteen-year-old Peruvian Augusto Flores, who with four companions and two dogs set off on foot from Buenos Aires to New York in 1926, was no more flattering about the Bolivian capital, especially when arrested on trumped up charges (Bolivia was at the time at war with Peru). The boys spent two days in a cramped, stinking cell, full of bugs and rats without daring to lie down. Anthony Daniels visited this same prison, the San Pedro, and chatted with four gringos inside for cocaine smuggling. He learned that those with money could get whatever they wanted, living in luxury with colour TV, whores and plentiful cocaine. Daniels was shown the prison for the poor (where young Flores spent his two nights) and it 137

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was “like the catacombs of hell. There were people in dark holes, like maggots in a cheese.” And yet, through a window, there was a spectacular view of Illimani, offering perhaps the best view from any prison in the world.

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Bolivia Potosí: Mountain of Silver In 1825 Simón Bolívar rode to Potosí after spending a month in La Paz. A triumphal arch welcomed him and he made one of his most famous speeches. Potosí might have been the city whose silver and tin bankrolled the Spanish empire, but for Bolívar it symbolized something else: “As for me, with my feet on this mountain of silver… I regard this opulence as nothing when I compare it with the glory of having carried the standard of freedom victoriously from the burning shores of the Orinoco to fix it here, on the peak of this mountain, whose breast is the wonder and envy of the world.” From Spain’s victory over the Incas, Potosí had replaced Cuzco as the “new navel” (and breast) and marvel of the world, ushering in the worship of Mammon. Potosí lies at a very high altitude of 13,350 feet, and was founded by the Spanish in 1545. Before them in 1462 the Inca Huayna Capac had admired the Cerro Rico (known to the Incas as Sumaj Opcko, “beautiful hill”, at 15,827 feet) and sent some men to mine it. They returned terrified after a voice of thunder had warned them not to touch the silver. So they built a pool for the Inca to bathe in nearby in the warm-water Laguna de Tarapaia, and threw gold into it. Gold for them was the tears of their sun-god, and had no commercial value. Potosí meant “a great clap of thunder” or “eruption of silver”. The Spanish established a city here after an Indian named Huallpa pulled away some ichu grass with his llamas and found veins of silver. There are several versions of this chance encounter, but these thick veins of silver ore on the summit were unique and the find triggered a fever of greed. Humboldt calculated, as only he could, that in 425 years Potosí had yielded 107,736, 294 silver marks. As Peter Bakewell has shown, its record output occurred in 1592 when the Cerro Rico, an ancient volcano to the south of the city, yielded 444,000 pounds of silver. Thereafter its production slowly declined, so that by 1710 the haul of silver was the same as in 1570 because 139

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the ore was deeper down and harder to extract. The Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist called the Cerro Rico a “gutted ruin” in 1967. The cost in terms of Indian labour was grotesque. Hemming has shown how the Spanish ensured Potosí’s productivity through pressganging Indians into a gigantic mita. The mines needed a constant flow of 4,500 men inside and around 8,000 more ready for shifts. They would travel with their families and worked for four miserable months with only Sundays off. Throughout its life as a cold, high-altitude mining city Potosí depended on Andean labour—and from 1608 black African slaves—as well as on the coca leaf. Vicente Quesada thought that eight million Indians, forced to work in the mita, had died there working their ten-hour day in the stifling mines, where the entrances to the tunnels were known as “mouths of hell”. For them it was always the “pudridero” (rotting place). Tschiffely, a cool observer, deemed their sufferings “probably never equalled in history.” He inspected an old mine called Socabón, with the Spanish coat of arms carved in the rock above its entrance, the cause of an estimated 20,000 Indian deaths. The tin extracted from this mine made a legend out of the local Patiño family’s wealth from the 1890s. It comes as no surprise that Tschiffely learned that all the miners hated Europeans. Potosí’s heyday as a city, according to Andrien, was between 1600 and 1650 when it had a population of some 150,000 (but figures are “notoriously imprecise”). The first census of 1573 showed 120,000 inhabitants (in 1825 this had shrunk to 8,000 as the silver ran out). Quesada said it was built in such haste that it did not follow the Spanish grid system, but it remains a colonial city with narrow streets and few pavements. Wind dominates the streets as it blows down from the treeless peaks and, in Cierza de León’s words, “dried everything and offended everything.” This offensive wind was called “El Tamahaví”. It still howls. Today Potosí’s population is around 60,000, and silver continues to be mined, but with high risks of silicosis due to exposure to dangerous dust. Life expectancy among miners is 45 years. In 1999 Mark Mann dismissed it as “a giant slag heap”. At one time Cervantes dreamed of being named “comendador” of this Villa Imperial, where the best opera singers arrived to entertain the colonial elite. Gordon Meyer said that by the end of the sixteenth century boom-town Potosí had fourteen dancing schools and thirty-five casinos, countless professional gamblers and official whores. Captain Andrews arrived in 1825 on behalf of a London mining company and said that “it 141

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looks like the city of a prince of sin, strange, desert, solitary, mysterious, a place of evil enchantment.” He actually met Bolívar there who cleverly refused to sell the mines to a Buenos Aires consortium. When Charles V made it an Imperial Town, he had inscribed on its shield “I am the rich Potosí, treasurer of the world, king of all mountains, envy of kings.” The phrase “as rich as Potosí” became a cliché in English and in Spanish. With vast wealth came galloping inflation. Incredible prices were paid for everyday items like eggs, nails or oats for everything had to be dragged up by mule. A Spaniard, according to Robert Cunningham Graham, offered 10,000 gold pesos for a saddle yet could not get one. Maruja Torres recorded a visit to the Casa de La Moneda or Mint (now a museum), built between 1753 and 1773 with doors tall enough to let llamas through, and thought that Potosí was a jewel of stone and wood, as exploited as Bolivia itself. Mules worked the old minting machines, perfectly preserved, by walking in circles. In 1933 Tschiffely found this same Casa de La Moneda the most remarkable building in South America. In 1771 the royal Inca descendant Concolorcorvo, on a trip to check on mules and staging posts from Buenos Aires to Lima, called the building “truly magnificent”. One reason for this surviving colonial presence is that Potosí has not experienced earthquakes and is well-preserved. In 1991 our daughter Tomasina took a truck ride up from Potosí to the co-operative mine in the Cerro Rico, and donned helmet, mask and light while miners chewed coca leaves and led the party of visitors into the darkness. The miners now only earn from what they can sell (not by the hour). She found no safety measures (unlike the miners in the state-owned mines) and noted that the tunnels were narrow, low and extremely dark, with unbearable heat in the deepest shafts. She offered a gift of coca leaves and dynamite, to appease “El Tío”, the demon in the hill. But it is sixteenth-century Potosí that stirs the imagination. Peter Bakewell has carefully constructed the life of one Antonio López de Quiroga, originally from Galicia, who reached Potosí in 1648 to become one of its richest men. Combing notarial records, with a historian’s aversion to invention, Bakewell conveys a sense of the place without recourse to personal documentation. Quiroga was a miner, a refiner (buying mercury), a merchant (of coca leaves) and a moneylender. He yearned for nobility but was denied it. He once led a procession to celebrate a canonization and invited 330 nobles, distributing arms, silk, beaver hats and 142

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stockings. A report described him as wearing so rich a costume of “dark brown cloth, embroidered with gold thread and studded with pearls and precious stones” that it cost around 40,000 pesos. He had jewels in his hat, including a diamond of a “rare size” costing 6,000 escudos. Bolivian poet Pedro Shimose, self-exiled in Madrid and the winner of Cuba’s most prestigious poetry prize Casa de las Américas in 1971, penned a poem “Chronicle of Metal” claiming that suffering is the primal experience of Bolivians. All are aware of loss, that all their riches are stolen. In “Alturas de Potosí”, self-consciously mocking Pablo Neruda’s “Alturas de Macchu Picchu”, he laments: Alalay, alalacito, It’s cold, very cold, mountain range of the Andes, mountains of Potosí, hill of huge shadows, mount of misfortune, usury’s mills, ground your yaraví song, ay de mi! only my sadness remains in Potosí, ay de mi!

Shimose includes a glossary, which gives alalay as an interjection meaning “it’s freezing”, while the yaraví is that sad Indian song, an Andean blues. The poet strolls around Potosí’s narrow streets, among its patios, steps and iron grilles and breathes through “the hard man of this landscape of cold/My suffering is a pit, my sadness a deep river.” In another poem “Speech about Latin America”, with its Bolivarian and Guevarist pan-American overtones, the poet speaks for his whole continent. Following condors over Lake Titicaca and eagles on Lake Pátzcuaro (in Mexico), he surveys the whole landmass. His “patria” is made of “maize and stone, of dreams and betrayals, of speeches and songs, of hunger and misery.” This might be a conventional view, but the poet identifies with its suffering: “To speak of my homeland it’s necessary to suffer it/I belong to a homeland without victories.” When he alludes to Bolivia, he relates its “agony” to its “naked heights” and even more specifically, to its stones. In a short lyric poem addressed in the intimate “tu” he enumerates its loneliness, its night, its abysses, its suffering shadows, its “kingdom of profound ostracism” and its bitterness. Led to 143

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the “obscure root of its mutism”, the poet senses the dumb language of stone.

Sucre Sucre, once called Chuquisaca, then La Plata and then Charcas, is the constitutional capital of Bolivia, with a university and archbishop. Lying at 9,000 feet and founded in 1538, it is a visually beautiful and harmonious colonial city of red-tiled roofs and, like Arequipa in Peru, is called the “white city”. The city can be looked down on from the heights of the red Cerro Churuquella, where Christ on the summit has replaced the mountain-top worship of the Incas. Gordon Meyer thought it was as cut off as the cities of Tibet. It was in the main plaza that he made sense of city life, disputing the Frenchman Alcide d’Orbigny’s claim that the best position to place oneself for such understanding was outside church doors when mass finishes. Meyer called the plaza “the most beautiful of the continent”, filled with palms, molle, tipa, and ceibo trees and flowers. From each corner, streets “run straight into the cordillera.” It was here that Potosí’s millionaires came to live, escaping altitude and bleak poverty in huge private palaces with “rejas” (iron grilles) and door knockers at two heights, for pedestrians and horsemen. It is a place where the telephone still does not seem to have arrived, stuck in a time-warp, cloistered, colonnaded and aristocratic, almost Old World. Meyer was invited into one palace belonging to an ex-ambassador, with its fifty to sixty rooms and art works hidden under dustsheets. It had a “recently abandoned” atmosphere for “Sucre is a city people leave” (an insight applicable to most of the Andes). Meyer was there to study the Jesuit expulsion from their archives in the Colegio del Sagrado Corazón and lost himself in the opium of learning— his nickname was “El Señor Investigador”. Like Daniels in La Paz, Meyer visited the city prison, noting walls that were “pitted and holed” and cells with rusty bars. He outlined what a prisoner eats and found the convicts strangely polite, like entering a “poor men’s club”. He also travelled outside the town to a country property, under a mountain called El Obispo, where the lives of the Quechua labourers in their adobe huts had not changed over three generations. He observed how the Andes condition a sort of motionless life: “the distant peaks re-emphasise this peace, which is immense, without frontiers.” In 2005 the Hispanist and art historian Michael Jacobs set off on a pil144

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grimage to retrace his Jewish grandfather’s train journeys in South America. He reached Antofagasta and then travelled by train inland, up into the Andes across the “saddest” desert in the world, the Atacama. From his account I learned that Harold Blakemore, a historian of Chile and its railroads and once my boss at university, had asked for his ashes to be scattered in the “desolate heart” of this desert, visited only by drivers of freight trains (and by Jacobs and then his readers). In the oasis village of San Pedro de Atacama, Jacobs spotted the “perfect cone of Licancapur”. At Ascotán, the highest point of the railway that employed his grandfather at the start of the twentieth century, he entered the altiplano, described as a flat and sandy emptiness averaging an altitude of 13,000 feet. Up there on the slow train he “had lost all sense of time and season.” At Uyumi, founded in 1889 as Bolivia’s gateway to the seas, he inspected a grid of unpaved streets with tin-roofed dwellings. He briefly visited the open-cast copper mine of Chuquicamata (see p.171), built round a mountain sacred to the Chuco Indians and travelled on to La Paz. At Sucre, where his grandfather had also rested, he was conscious of the university atmosphere, the neoclassical theatre and official buildings and the miniature Eiffel Tower shaking in the wind in Parque Bolívar. It was a city he recognized because of its “pervasive Spanishness”, a “small aristocratic Andalucian town such as Carmona” (outside Seville).

The Andes Imagined (7): Alcides Arguedas’ RAZA DE BRONCE

In 1924 the poet César Vallejo paid Alcides Arguedas (1879-1946), then representing Bolivia as consul general in Paris, a visit. He portrayed him as an “andinista de basto y hacha” (a complete Andean). At that time there was a movement called “Andinism” aiming to unite Peru, Bolivia and Chile. Vallejo felt as if he were back at home with him in his “sweet chain of mountains”. Arguedas’ main untranslated work, Raza de bronce, took its time to attain continental fame. There was an early version in 1904 titled Watawara, the name of the ill-fated female protagonist. She is promised to a village boy but has a relationship with the cholo administrator and becomes pregnant, appearing to get rid of her baby and marrying her novio. Then she is raped, though pregnant, by five rich whites on holiday and fights back with such force that they accidentally kill her. The community rises 145

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up and burns the five young men. Enlarged, the story appeared as Raza de bronce in 1919, but Arguedas rejected this edition as plagued with errors. It resurfaced in Valencia, Spain, in 1923, but only the 1944 Buenos Aires edition satisfied the author. The novel opens and closes with descriptions of the mountains around Lake Titicaca and the lakeside village of Kohahuyo. Wind predominates in its “eternal melopea”, the only sound in the empty expanse. The tragic shepherdess, Wata-Wara, appears standing on a hill, searching for a lost lamb, and looks down as the sun sets on the lake burning red like embers. Apart from patches of oats, the land, comprising treeless grey and black plains, is “sad and opaque”, sterile in the perennial cold of the altitudes. This landscape informs the souls of its inhabitants. As well as the wind and altitude, rivers play a part in explaining the Andean mentality. Life is a constant battle with torrents, which are “treacherous, fickle, implacable”, while the river is worse than the plague as it drowns mules and men, but without bridges it must be crossed. Another natural phenomenon is the mazamorra, a sea of mud that devours whole villages, and a kind of quicksand that kills. But dominating all else are the mountains, especially Illimani. In air so clear that it vibrates the Indian travellers see the peak “lording over other mountain tops… majestic and inaccessible,” blocking out the sky with its granite and snow. Unlike tourists, they do not admire this scene, but feel overawed and scared; it “suffocates” them. Illimani imposes its “infinite silence” on to them as if inflicting pain. It makes them, and the condors, insignificant, weak, impotent and terrified. As the novel evolves, Arguedas sprinkles it with Quechua terms, explained to his urban readers in brackets rather than in a glossary since it is meant to explain Indian life on Lake Titicaca, down to the tiniest details. We learn how the Indians crouch in their huts around the stove practising accullico, described as chewing coca in silence. Their songs are as sad as the wind. Their food, eaten in deathly silence so that all you hear is chewing, is cold chuño, cooked maize, charqui and rolls of kispiña. They follow their witchdoctors and believe in evil spells. When Quilco becomes ill, he is covered with a just slaughtered sheep and made to eat a potion of mud and ground glass (which immediately kills him). When they want fish to multiply in the lake, they catch one, put a coca leaf in its mouth and throw it back (but it floats to the surface and is gobbled by birds). We read 146

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about typical customs, from duck hunts and harvests to funerals and marriages. Life is hard and drinking is the Indians’ only escape. If the high altitudes do not defeat them, then their white masters will, and destiny is seen as suffering; life is crying, struggling and then dying. They hate the whites implacably, although if “we kill one, another will come and it will be the same.” A white landowner tells a friend: “I tell you sincerely, I hate them to death and they hate me to death. They steal, cheat and trick me and I hit them with sticks and pursue them.” In between are the cholos, despised by both white and Indian. That is Bolivia, according to Arguedas. His novel builds on his essay Pueblo enfermo (Sick People, 1909), which reduces Bolivia’s problems to “environment” and the “inheritance” of the three social groups. Using the concepts of contemporary racism, Arguedas rages against miscegenation and identifies the mixed-race cholos as the cause of Bolivia’s backwardness. There is an ironic self-portrait of the writer within the novel. Suárez, a guest of the landowner, plans to write a novel about Inca legends around Lake Titicaca featuring Túpac Amaru and the arrival of the Spaniards and intends to go to Cuzco for his research. While the other whites slaughter the Indians’ chickens, he daydreams, chain-smoking, of his novel. Yet despite much research he just cannot express the right details of Inca court life. His bedside book is French, Marmontel’s Los Incas, but Suárez cannot see the actual realities under his nose. He is just another of those “líricos” (lyric poets) who defend the Indian through literature without knowing anything. He reads his latest “legend” to his friends and they endure seven pages of pseudo-Inca tripe, a bogus literary view of golden Lake Titicaca with Indians speaking in honeyed tones, like white pedants. Aware of the pernicious romanticization of indigenous life, Arguedas wanted to offer a modern, unflinchingly accurate corrective, and thereby created a scandal. No wonder there was a revolution in 1952, and then long overdue agrarian reform.

Tschiffely and the Indians The Swiss-born Aimé Félix Tschiffely (1895-1954) had been teaching in Argentina for nine years when he decided to ride a horse to Washington. He bought Mancha and Gato, fifteen- and sixteen-year-old creole horses, from a Patagonian chief called Liempichu and set off on his three-year trip, covering 10,000 miles in the saddle alone. He took a repeating rifle, 147

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a revolver and a .44, with a cooking pot, rice, beans, heavy silver coins (as Indians only accepted these), a compass, maps and two unnamed books. Most of his nights were spent in huts and police stations. He is a trustworthy guide and note-taker, disinclined to boast or exaggerate, and later wrote a study of the Inca, Coricancha: Garden of Gold (1943). His Tschiffely’s Ride (1933) is an encyclopaedia of observation, much revolving around indigenous customs and practices. He notices, for instance, that Indians always place a stone on a pass or at a high point as a ceremony of leaving behind the sorrows of the journey. He quickly learns that when asking directions he is always told “siga derecho no más” (straight ahead) or “aquí a la vuelta’ (round the corner) or “cerquita” (quite close), answers that bear no relation to actual time or distance (he is once told “aquicito”, just here, and the place in question is over a hundred miles away). He admires the Indians’ ability to run in such altitudes, and to perform “amazing feats of endurance”. He sees runners on their backs with their feet in the air and is told that this brings the blood back into the body. He also observes that the indigenous people are very kind to their animals and can thus give a “humanitarian lesson” to the whites. He notes their passion for cockfighting and how they use slings, with unerring aim, rather than dogs to control their llamas. More tellingly, Tschiffely watches in horror how in Bolivia an Indian approaches a white on hands and knees, having taken off his hat, to kiss his feet, a “degrading custom” dating back to the Spanish. The authorities in the villages, usually cholos, keep whips made from dried bulls’ penises and use them constantly on the local Indians. He observes how an accused murderer held in a police station cannot understand what is being said in Aymara, but at every unanswered question is whipped, while even the accusers are whipped if they talk too much. He itches to shot the cholo in charge, but desists. After witnessing the aftermath of the rape of a thirteen-year-old in the police chief ’s room, Tschiffely is mocked by the police for being sentimental: “for who cared a damn about an Indian wretch?” He chronicles Indians press-ganged into the army, to fight wars for a country they do not even know exists. Wisely he never rides after sunset, as Indians are apt to attack whites, especially as he is taken for a “Chilean” (Chile had robbed Bolivia of its ports, and Peru of its nitrates in the War of the Pacific). Tschiffely’s impressions, albeit those of an outsider, merely confirm the truth of Alcides Arguedas’ fiction. 148

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Oruro and Cochabamba In 1903 C. H. Prodgers took the coach from La Paz to Oruro, one hundred and eighty miles in two days, changing the five mules and horse every nine miles. At 12,000 feet, under a blue sky in the “pure and exhilarating air”, he found the trip most enjoyable. Oruro is a tin mining town and a railway terminus, plagued by severe water shortages. Pedro Shimose grapples with Oruro in his poem “The Kingdoms of Death”, alluding to its “highland thirst” and the “loneliness of wind and puna”. He laments: “Oruro de mi amor y de mis penas”, a town notorious for its hunger, workers’ strikes, unions, prison and a “flaying wind”. Michael Jacobs was there in 2005 and sought out Oruro’s spiritual focus, the famous Socavón mineshaft highlighted against the ochre mountains. The blue-painted Patiño palace, constructed for the “king of tin”, and the famous, upcoming carnival impressed him. He entered a minemuseum and met El Tío who rules the underworld and to whom miners offer coca leaves. Oruro witnessed the start of the 1952 Bolivian revolution, led by the miners. Oruro was also one of the centres for the exporting of chinchilla fur. Tony Morrison calls the grey rat-sized creature “truly Andean” as it had adapted to height and cold thanks to its fabulous fur, though now it has become almost extinct. He records that in 1905, 18,153 dozen skins were exported, fetching between $100 and $115 per dozen. Some are now being farmed near Lake Titicaca. In 1973 a male chinchilla was worth $250 dollars, and it now has a future as a pet. Prodgers rode on from Sucre another 190 miles in eight days to reach Cochabamba, standing at 8,200 feet and boasting of the best climate in the world. There was plenty of food, he observed, well paved streets with gutters down the middle, houses with “iron bars” but no hotels (at least in 1903). Murders were common, and when caught the murderer was dragged to the spot of his crime and shot there. He witnessed a cholo tried and executed in that way. Prodgers rented a house for three years, setting off to find Jesuit treasures (the Jesuits mined gold, and the “famous Espirito Santo gold mine” was ten days away by mule). His way to the jungle passed under Cerro Turani, at 17,000 feet. Cochabamba is Bolivia’s third city, founded in 1542 in a bowl with hills around, and cathedral, university and one of the Patiño mansions. There are now hotels and signs of prosperity. John Hopkins was there in 149

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1973 and compared it with Arequipa as another “superior Andean town”. He liked its pure air, its warm, brisk climate, its clean streets and especially its parks embellished by profusions of flowers. Arequipa and Cochabamba, due to their advanced ages and relative isolation, have attained what he rightly called “a degree of wisdom”.

The Andes Imagined (8): R. C. Hutchinson’s RISING R. C. Hutchinson died in 1975 as he completed his novel Rising, published posthumously in 1976 and Booker Prize-listed. It is a well-researched, realistic, historical recreation in a vividly evoked landscape of highland Bolivia. In a note he acknowledges a library in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, now Bolivia’s booming second city, an academic from a university in Pereira (in the Cauca Valley of Colombia) and what appears to be an apocryphal book about the Andes. Hutchinson characterized himself as a “venturer in the byways of South American history”. I assume that his adventures were bookish and that he never set foot there. The altiplano is conveyed by a travelling bishop around the 1920s as a “chain of ruts and potholes… a remorseless oscillation within a static landscape, scorched and lifeless in the blow of heat” under a “changeless, intolerable sky”. The bishop enters a Bolivian church and laments its gaudy baroque excess, its “apocalyptic fantasies on every wall and ceiling, a prodigality of nails and arrows creating rivers of unlifelike gore; always this extravagance of tasteless bijouterie, of costly monstrances, of pyxchests overwrought in bad baroque.” Considering this alien Spanish construction, he asks: How long will it remain? The great constructions of Sacsaihuamán, of Tihuanaco, Machu Picchu, have survived in essence because they were born of the land, devised by men for whom the land was a natural inheritance. Here even the native palms are wilting, and this place inspired by Spanish memories will perish, traceless, under winds and suns more pitiless than those of Spain.

Rising reiterates this insight about the Spaniards being “intruders” and “squatters” who do not belong to the land. Those who do belong are the “Usqueñe indios” who harbour “dark resentment behind their deferential eyes” while waiting—the Inkarri myth again—“with a sinister patience 150

The Bolivian altiplano: “work and wounds”

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for the laminae of civilization to crumble and be swept away.” One Indian speaks for all: “It’s not for us, this world, it belongs to the strangers… For us there’s only labour—work and wounds, gaining nothing, just staying alive to suffer.” These indigenous communities are attached to the land through “blood inheritance” and a wordless grasp of the “mournful grandeur of their antiquity”. What remains of the Inca inheritance is an ability to withstand extremes of climate in a harsh environment. All who live in Bolivia are prisoners of the “stupendous age and backwardness and everlasting cruelty” of place. An example is what is called the “zona de terremoto”, a “tract of ravaged crust … a world in its primeval state, a lump of furnaced metal lately cooled, waiting to be beaten by the wind.” This is a landscape of “perfect nakedness”, where mines and greed are seen to “rape our hills”, but the ancient bedrock of Andean land can also cleanse and offer sudden beauty like “a flight of flamingos over Titicaca” and a new morality of “escaping egotism”.

Weaving Andean oral cultures expressed their aesthetic senses in stunning colours and weaving. The fleece of alpaca, vicuña and llama, or cotton traded from the coast, were naturally dyed into the bright colours that are known round the world as Peruvian or Bolivian, but go back to pre-Inca cultures such as the Paracas or the Nazca whose textiles found in tombs are “among the finest ever loomed”, according to von Hagen. Inca looms turned these textiles into clothes and the ubiquitous ear-flapped woollen hats called chullu. Geometrical abstract images mixed with animal symbols decorate ponchos or are used on rugs. The lower down the social order the more elementary the design and the more easily reproducible. The Inca emperor’s tunic was complex, beyond regularity, while his soldiers wore black and white tunics. Weaving historian Rebecca Stone-Miller exclaimed: “Imagine 10,000 warriors in checkerboard tunics advancing over the hill!” The poncho is post-conquest but is similar to the Inca chusma, with a slit for the head and the arms bare, or the woollen yacolla wrapped over the shoulders above the chusma. Women wore tunics down to the ground called anaco and a shawl, the illiclla, with a broad belt or chumpi. These were working clothes woven by state weavers, stored in tambos and handed out to every Inca. It was akin to a uniform and, according to Hemming, the people were forbidden any variations. The Inca royal family wore 152

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clothes of vicuña fleece and their ceremonial adornments were goldthreaded, with bird feathers. The Inca himself wore even grander clothes, as Pedro Pizarro noted when he asked what Atahualpa’s cloak was made of and was told “the skins of vampire bats that fly at night.” Harold Osborne speaks for most historians when he claims that the “art of weaving achieved a perfection both in technique and in design which has been rarely equalled.” A crucial difference between the Indians and cholos has always been the formers’ preference for hand-woven and dyed clothes, whereas the latter wore factory-made garments. In the pre-Inca and Inca periods both men and women were weavers, engaged in a non-stop activity. The Argentine novelist Mujica Lainez, on his way to La Paz, noted that the ponchos worn by the Indians seen from the train matched the colours of the landscape. Later approaching Oruro, he spotted grey shacks with crosses on top and the only splashes of moving colour in the monochrome landscape were the Indians themselves in their ponchos. William Stein observed how in the village of Hualcán the women carried their spinning equipment wherever they went, and were never idle. Most carried the belt loom, called the kallwa, which can be tied to any hook from the waist, and some also owned the telar, a horizontal Spanish loom. Clothing, according to Stein, was not a straightforward clue to individual wealth as men and women wore the same clothes; it was rather the number of skirts worn, up to eight, that revealed status. George Woodcock also recorded the sight of women constantly twirling their spindles, with eight or nine skirts as sign of financial status. He found women more conservative in dress than the men, preserving more “obstinately” the past.

Andean Food and Markets In the global village food seems to have detached itself from place as you can eat what you like around the world. International menus have widely replaced local ones. Yet food still defines national and individual identity—and not always to the taste of outsiders. Indigenous food in Latin America can be disgusting to the uninitiated. I was brought up a vegetarian but have been served soups with cocks’ crests floating in them, have eaten horse meat in a stew in Paraguay, armadillo cooked in its armour, a hairless dog in Mexico, a roasted guinea pig on a spit in Lima and countless slimy bits and pieces from the seas in Chile. 153

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The Andes, of course, has its own distinctive cuisine that has attracted and repelled visitors for centuries. Strangely, the Incas were almost vegetarian. When the Spaniards first arrived on the Peruvian coast, they were so hungry that they even boiled and ate leather and were shocked that the natives “had no news of bread or wine.” Francisco de Jerez called them “dirty people” who ate raw meat and fish with boiled or toasted maize, but details are few. Manuel Scorza, writing in the 1950s from his experience of defending Peruvian highland communities, boasted that the real art of those who lived in Yanahuanca was cooking. Even an estofado made with stones, he exaggerated, would taste good. He simply listed the dishes, as if the names could somehow be tasted (he wrote from exile in Paris, so nostalgia had a role in his list): ají (chilli pepper) de gallina (hen), carapulcra a la morena, tamales, cuchipanda, humitas (maize), arroz (rice) con pato (duck) a la chiclayana, pícaro cabrito (young goat) a la norteña, ampulosa papa (potato) a la huancaína, ocopa a la arequipeña… These are less recipes than a chant, a lyric poem, with references to place (Chiclaya, Huancayo, Arequipa). The Inca Garcilaso also wrote his nostalgic compendium of indigenous life from exile in sixteenth-century Spain, correcting erroneous Spanish views and prejudices about his native Peru. He too covered food (some of his notes follow), including beans he called frisoles (in Mexico they are frijoles) which originated in Peru. The main sort was purutu, known today as poroto or kidney bean (phaseolus vulgaris) in Argentina. These were cooked in stews, though other coloured beans were used as toys, which he played with. When the Inca Garcilaso refers to pepino (cucumber) we come to one of the most touching moments of his work for he has forgotten the indigenous name and has exhausted himself trying to remember it. Peru was too far away for him to check through his blood relations, and he begs his reader forgiveness for this memory lapse in a work so “incomportable” (intolerable). Not all culinary experiences are appetizing. When the American Carroll K. Michener recounted his travels in Heir of the Incas (1926) he was one of the countless tourists scared of getting ill. Hungry in a train to Cuzco, he watched “swarming food vendors” offering choclos, translated as “corn on the cob with huge kernels in calico colours”, cheese cakes, meat pastries, chupe (a “soup of delicate mysteries”), dwarf peaches and bread 154

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rolls. A sumptuous feast, he thought, until he noticed “the gritty hands” of the vendors. John Hopkins, a keen drinker as he toured South America in 1972, stood in Arequipa’s Plaza de Armas, where pavement cafés offered pisco and lemon and anticuchos, which he translated as “chunks of bull’s heart on sticks”. The same dish features in countless Latin American cookbooks, but maybe you need several piscos to swallow one. Clemente Onelli lived and worked with the Tehuelche Indians, and studied their eating habits. When a mare was slaughtered for her meat, one Indian skilfully cut out the still-beating heart and then, hands held high, squeezed it until the last drop of blood was out so that the Spirit of Evil was calmed. They then barbecued the flesh. Onelli also learned that the cone of the great Chilean Araucaria tree, as large as a baby’s head, gave nuts that the Indians ate raw or toasted. They also boiled them in water and buried them in a damp place so that the nut fermented, to be eaten during winter, though its “smell and taste surely will not please European stomachs.” Where food is bought and sold is essential to the Andes. Carleton Beals visited Huancayo in 1932 and what struck the US writer resident in Mexico was its market, with brilliant-hued rugs, maize, carved fruits, pigs, ponchos, lariats, woven belts and sashes, barley, potatoes, hides, vicuña furs, dolls, sandals and more. In the hampi-katu (folk remedy) stalls can be found linseed, copal, the sleep-producing tara, dried roseleaves, melon seeds, mani for the heart, llama grease, verdolaga for dysentery, vanilla beans as an aphrodisiac, vanilla leaves to remove freckles, powdered chirimoya leaves to kill lice, alfalfa flowers for cough syrups, cat nails for the verruga. (Verruga is a nasty contagious disease of huge warts.) The national dish papa a la huancaína consists of boiled yellow potatoes in a sauce of cheese and ají, served on lettuce and slices of boiled eggs and olives. Markets are also pharmacies, places to cure yourself. The Inca Garcilaso gave vivid details about Inca medicine, based on plant knowledge. They purged themselves by stuffing themselves with a small tuber like a “white turnip”, then lay in the sun, became dizzy and vomited all that was inside them. Garcilaso said that he purged himself this way twice in his life. They also used tobacco powder to clean their heads (of ache), and milk from the molle tree to staunch and heal wounds.

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Guinea Pigs and Natural Viagra The cuy, or guinea pig (cavia aparera), is the Andean delicacy par excellence. Surviving between 22 and - 7°C, it was domesticated in the altiplano, according to Edmundo Morales, from around 5000BC. It breeds prolifically and figures in folk medicine, where “witchdoctors”, male and female, rub the animal over the sick parts of the body, or even sacrifice it. Morales estimates that some 100 million guinea pigs are slaughtered every year in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. This tail-less edible pet is both high in protein and low in fat, containing more protein per body weight than beef, pork or lamb and far less fat. It is considered a delicacy in picante de cuy and the earth oven dish pachamanca de cuy. The sight of skinned cuys in market places is not to everybody’s taste, so whether you like the sight and taste of a cuy is a small part of how you relate to the Andes. The Spanish called it the “rabbit of the Indies”, and Morales includes in his study an illustration of an anonymously painted “Last Supper” hanging in the convent of Santa Clara in Quito where Christ stands holding a succulent cuy as his last dish. A crucial ingredient in much Andean cooking is the maní or cacahuete, in English peanut or groundnut. In Bolivia the peanut is the basis of the famous sopa de maní; in Peru ocopa a la arequipeña, referred to earlier by Scorza, has a sauce of peanuts, hot peppers, onions, garlic and oil. The peanut (arachis hypogaen) is a leguminous, trailing plant whose seed goes back underground. It was first domesticated in Bolivia some 7,600 years ago, then taken to Africa via Brazil. Its properties include 85 per cent unsaturated fats and high levels of niacin and antioxidants that lower cholesterol, but peanuts can also be highly allergenic. De la Condamine, according to Felipe Fernández-Armesto, carried peanuts in his pockets while walking about in Quito, “asserting that they were the best treasure he had seen in America.” A less known Andean staple, maca (Lepidium peruvianum Chacon) was tested during Chibcha culture and then adopted by the Incas. It builds up energy and has been promoted as a natural version of Viagra. The root of a shrub that grows between 11,000 and 13,000 feet in the Central Andes, especially in the Meseta del Bombóm near Junín, it specifically needs a temperature of between 4 and 7°C in the day and - 8°C at night. Maca seems to have been rediscovered in 1961 and is now hailed on websites as a miracle drug for fertility and postponing ageing. When the Pe156

Wild guinea pig, Peru

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ruvian football team Cienciano beat the Argentine club River Plate in the 2003 Copa Libertadores, high up in the Andes, the whole team had ingested maca, a revelation that predictably caused a scandal in the Argentine press. It is the highest grown food in the world.

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Argentina Tales of the Empty Puna Argentina is not usually associated with Andean culture, and most Argentines (and visitors) identify more with Buenos Aires and the larger cities than with the mountain range that runs down the west of the country. Yet the long and contested border Argentina shares with Chile is found in, and determined by, the Andes, and in 1978 the two countries almost went to war over border issues. Now, growing numbers of tourists are drawn to the spectacular peaks and lakes of the Argentine Andes and to the great wildernesses of Patagonia. But this is a relatively recent development. For centuries the mountains were avoided rather than sought out by most travellers, except explorers and naturalists, because of their sheer desolation and inaccessibility. Voices from the region were few and far between, and it was not until the twentieth century that the harsh puna, the lonely highlands of Argentina, began to feature in works of the imagination.

The Andes Imagined (9): Héctor Tizón’s FUEGO EN

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From the bus window, as we climbed slowly up to La Quiaca, it seemed that nobody could live in the reddish, naked mountainous landscape dotted with cactuses. Then we picked up an old Indian who sat next to me and started to talk. I was imbued with Castañeda’s stories about Mexican desert Indians, but found this old man hard to understand. He had bloodshot eyes and dirty yellow teeth, held his large hat and a bundle on his lap and mumbled. I picked out the word “lake”. Then the bus stopped and he got off, in the middle of the dry, hostile, empty landscape. Later, I scoured a map and saw that he was not lying. He meant the shallow Lago Pozuelos (12,275 feet high), now within a national park. He had a long walk ahead of him under a relentlessly blue sky. Héctor Tizón was born in 1929 in Jujuy, the north-western Argentine 159

Andean salar or salt lake, Argentina

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province that borders Bolivia and Chile, and grew up with the tales told by illiterate Indian servants and by cholos abusing gerunds in their bad Spanish. After years of exile in Spain and Mexico, he became a judge and now lives in Yala. His enigmatic and lyrical first novel, Fuego en Casabindo (Fire in Casabindo, 1969) is his exploration of life in the puna, that vast, empty and silently lunar landscape over 13,000 feet high. Casabindo is a real place up there, with a stark, white, twin-towered church built in 1772 and known as the Cathedral of the Puna. He wrote his novel in Tilcara (already at around 10,000 feet), looking through a window at the naked mountains. Tilcara itself is the site of a huge and mysterious preColumbian cemetery and city fort (pukara), surrounded by high mountains like the Nevado de Chañi (20,294 feet) and the Cerro Morado (16,792 feet). Like Tizón, we urban readers also look out of his window onto an alien world where landscape shapes the soul, and land belongs to the devil high up in the mountains. Tizón learned from his master Juan Rulfo neither to explain nor to be explicit. He also grasps that the world of the people on the puna is fast vanishing. Like Rulfo, he evokes ghost towns and hearsay from the dead. We listen to their voices, and as in a dream, catch them in fragmented images. Both are writers of a remote and neglected indigenous America on the wane. The novel vaguely outlines a battle between urban officials and their land-grabbing allies and small farmers, who try to convince the judge in Jujuy of their land deeds but fail, so take to arms (slings and stones) and are slaughtered by an army of Mausers. Yet there is a sort of poetic justice: killers are haunted in dreams by their victims and victory comes at a terrible price. (Or so I guess, for the novel is not obvious or logical.) The novel opens with a vivid description of the puna: Here the land is hard and sterile; the sky is closer than anywhere else and is blue and empty. It doesn’t rain, but when the sky roars its voice is terrifying, implacable, angry. On this land, where it is painful breathing, people depend on many gods. There are no extraordinary men here and surely there never will be any. All is confused and slowly dying.

This is the archetypal Andes, and frightening. The merciless, cold wind is omnipresent, likened to the devil’s “howls”; there is “only pain in this wind land”. 161

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Fragments of dialogue within the novel emphasize that this is a cursed frontier land, far from that messianic lost world that Túpac Amaru and Bolívar fought for: “We are not worth anything outside our place, Genovevo. Those who leave die… Here we also die, and a bad death in these barren mountains. Each time we are less. Winds scrape the fields, churches and abandoned houses full of fleas and owls… This land has been stripped of people and is without owners and is ungrateful, it’s true. I won’t blame you if you shit on it.” One of the voices repeats a saying heard in Abra Pampa: “If Jujuy had a body, the puna would be its arsehole.” The famous asymmetrical and glistening salt lakes of the puna epitomize this hell that over centuries tested its inhabitants in ways that have now been lost. Today’s vast white lake, where one or two Indians still cut out salt blocks, attracts a few tourists and a shack sells a coke or two. But for Tizón this salar is like a mirror reflecting the moon, an old sea, the zone where a mythical giant black bull with fiery lidless eyes whispers that whoever does not lose his mind loses his life. Tizón’s oral novel is hard to read without a glossary or local dictionary, and he wants us urban readers to feel like strangers. Certainly one of the most isolated Andean towns I have seen is Yavi, with its narrow, intimate streets, white baroque seventeenth-century church and the crumbling mansion of the Marquis of Tojo, which still contains, under a glass bell, a first edition copy of Cervantes’ Don Quijote. It was a real place before people emigrated, and this house features dreamily in the novel and was abandoned when the last marquis died a prisoner of Spain in Jamaica in 1816. Tizón compares the puna with Tibet, its howling winds capricious like some minor forgotten god. All is being forgotten, he suggests, repeating that cultural amnesia that the Spanish conquistadors inflicted on indigenous peoples, as had earlier the Incas on their subjects. Yet “the land will remain the same, stones hypnotized by the moon, dust shaken by the wind.” Yala, where Tizón lives, has a small lake, surrounded by peaks. We stayed there in 1971 in a rundown Peronist summer camp, the only guests. Tizón makes it clear that few people now choose to live up there in the wind and cold, except the smugglers who pass through with cocaine and trafficked women destined for the cities, and staring sheep and llamas. Even so, computers are changing attitudes to place. In Abra Pampa, a sierra 162

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town of 14,000 people some seventy miles from the border with Bolivia, the sun at midday is stronger than anywhere else in the world. After the lead mines near the central plaza closed, a community of over 3,000 women established a micro-credit and cooperative weaving scheme named Warmi Sayajsunqo. Community-minded and ayllu-conscious, the organization has linked traditional indigenous skills to modern communications and marketing. There are some half a million indigenous people in Argentina, with the Kolla and Mapuche the largest groups. Not everyone now leaves places like Abra Pampa.

Gorriti’s Andes The desolate puna is reached through “quebradas” (ravines or narrow valleys), the main one, the Humahuaca, forming the old “Camino Real” up to La Quiaca and on to Bolivia. One of Latin America’s first professional writers was a woman, Juana Manuela Gorriti (1819-92), who was forced to flee her aristocratic home in Salta by the throat-cutting forces of the dictator Manuel Rosas. She travelled up the Camino Real to Bolivia on mule, and once there married Manuel Belzú while still fourteen years old. He became president of Bolivia until he was assassinated. She then fled to Lima, ran a school and a literary salon, and finally returned to Buenos Aires when Rosas fell, and took up writing. She recreated this journey into the Andes and subsequent exile in a ghost story “Yocci’s Well”, set during the war of independence in 1814, where a drama of jealousy and female rivalry mirrors the split between rebels to the Spanish crown and those who remain faithful. Through the story she makes her urban reader aware of the aura of bewitchment in the landscape. The Andes become an amphitheatre, with a breach called the Abra de Tumbaya through which one reaches the “arid, desolate country, truly Theban, where all vegetation ceases.” The boulders, the saline lakes and the “waste lands” swept by winds bring to her mind, inevitably, Dante’s hell. Tilcara and Iruya are mentioned in the story; the latter, accessible through the Abra del Cóndor, is a tourist attraction today, though one of the highest villages in the Argentine Andes (at 7,600 feet). Nearby, is the village and ravine of Purmamarca, where a freak range of reddish hills causes the warm weather from the Amazon to mix with cold air from Patagonia to produce the worst storms in the Andes. In its lovely 1648 church there are scenes from the life of Santa Rosa of Lima. 163

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In Gorriti’s story a woman goes to a cave to consult a shaman, an old Indian with copper-coloured skin, a pet eagle and a silver phial. As still as the rocks, he reads an old book and gets the woman to breathe in his potion. She is then killed by her brutish, lusting husband and thrown down a well. Later he, in turn, is killed by her ghost and thrown down the same well. In contrast to Gorriti’s melodramatic vision, a recent English traveller, Polly Evans, found the puna “eerily empty”, its “utter lifelessness faintly terrifying”, a “huge dusty void” that pressed down on her. Jujuy, the most Andean of Argentine cities, stands in a valley at 3,444 feet, watered by two rivers called the Grande and the Chico (or Xibi Xibi). Concolorcorvo noted in 1771 that one was crystalline and the other muddy—a mixture of Spaniard and Indian, he joked. The city was founded in 1593. General Belgrano razed it to rubble in 1812 to stop his Spanish royalist enemies living there. The train arrived in 1903 and, as Tizón remarks, started one exodus, while immigrants from Bolivia flooded in, making it more and more Andean in atmosphere. Nearby are the Cerro de Claros (4,657 feet) and the Cerro Chuquina (5,431 feet), peaks which send winds down with such an impetus in the morning that it amazed and annoyed Concolorcorvo. When the journalist Roberto Payró arrived in Jujuy by train (it was the end of the line), a shopkeeper told him that the city needed fresh water and a proper road, for during the rainy season from December to May rain cut the city off completely and all business with Bolivia ceased. Jujuy had lived by exporting sheep, mules and horses to Peru and Bolivia. Payró found a poor city, sunk in monastic silence and arbitrarily situated (it could have been anywhere else). The town of one-storey houses painted in clashing colours with dark tiles and unkempt streets contrasted with the bare mountains. People lived on fresh air, he quipped.

Roberto Payró and Catamarca Roberto Payró (1867-1928) was a gifted journalist who listened to people. His chronicles from Patagonia, and then from Catamarca, were written for the great newspaper La Nación, informing urban Argentines about their hinterland. He was also a socialist and fiction writer. En las tierras de Inti (In the Lands of Inti) appeared in 1909, a wonderful account of living in Catamarca, the poorest region in the country, and travelling on mule along the Cuesta del Totoral to Tucumán and then by train to Jujuy. 164

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San Fernando del Valle de Catamarca, the capital, was founded in 1683. All around the city are high mountains, the Sierra de Graciana, the Sierra del Alto and the Sierra de Ambato, with its peak Cerro El Manchao reaching 11,892 feet. The Incas had conquered the warring Calchaquí tribes but they continued to resist the Spanish until the end of the seventeenth century. It is yet another grid city, its central square designed by Carlos Thays, who lived in Buenos Aires’ botanical gardens. His Plaza 25 de Mayo exhibits “luscious vegetation”, in Payró’s words, with enough shade to offer escape from a sun that “falls down like a rain of fire, scorching the sand.” In the centre of the plaza stood a pyramid celebrating the defeats of the cacique General Quiroga by General Paz during the civil war between the federals of the Andean states and the unitarians of Buenos Aires in 1829 (Sarmiento’s famous 1845 pamphlet Civilización o barbarie was a biography of this same Quiroga). In 1841 a governor was beheaded there. According to Payró, Catamarca was a town of single-floor houses, still “very Spanish”, where the constant wind swept the streets clean. Although not particularly high (1,396 feet), he suffered from soroche. He found the inhabitants discontented, badly governed and regularly fleeced. Immigration changed the place from the 1890s, with the arrival of Syrians and Lebanese. In the town’s Club Social, Payró talked to the local dignitaries. One said that the three riches of Catamarca were earthquakes, interventions from the capital and the Virgen del Valle. On the plaza stands the nineteenth-century cathedral that houses this famous virgin. Anything miraculous that has happened over countless generations has been attributed to her. She was found in a cave in the Choya hills by a Calchaquí Indian in 1630 and is made of ceibo wood. Even though her cult predates the arrival of Christianity, she resides above the cathedral’s main altar behind a window, wearing “a magnificent crown of diamonds” (though the Rough Guide finds her “hideously kitsch”). The real miracle, Payró joked, was the number of pilgrims she attracted twice a year to the advantage of local businesses. He linked her to the still surviving worship of Pachamama, the fertility goddess who wanders the sierra. Payró lamented the state of the indigenous people, who still lived in primitive shacks, had no ambition and remained laconic, even mute. He referred to a law of 1691 that forbade Indians to wear shoes, dress like Spaniards or leave their hair long. The penalty for trying to ape Spanish 165

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dress was fifty strokes of a whip. Perhaps not surprisingly, there had been three Indian rebellions, known as the Calchaquí wars. The first was in 1561, led by Juan Calchaquí; the second in 1630, led by Juan Chelemín, cacique of Hualfín, who protested against the slavery of the encomienda system and forced mita work. He expelled the Jesuits and sacked the town of Londres before he was caught and hung, drawn and quartered in Londres. The third uprising was led by the so-called Falso Inca, Pedro Chamijo, garrotted in Lima in 1667. Payró later wrote an historical novel about him, El falso Inca (1905), telling the story of the Andalucian swindler who hoaxed the governor of Londres and the Calchaquí Indian chiefs by claiming he knew of secret mines and would destroy the whites. The novel’s accurate anecdote underlines the simmering rebelliousness of the Indians who were unwilling to remain “slaves”, but also their technological inferiority as they had only bows and arrows against guns. During his travels Payró twice bumped into an Englishman called Mr. Blen, whose irony he liked. Blen travelled around Argentina evaluating mining and commercial possibilities. He joked, “I’m fed up and am off to London,” and Payró thought that was the last he would see of him. But a few weeks later they met again. Weren’t you meant to be in London?, asked Payró. Yes, I was there, replied Blen, but in the town of Londres (Spanish for London) in Catamarca, an Argentine equivalent of Paris, Texas. In fact the second oldest city in Argentina, Londres was founded in 1558 by Diego de Almagro to honour the marriage of Philip II and Mary Tudor (on 28 August 1554). According to Ben Box, the town hall displays a glass coat-of-arms of the City of London and a copy of the marriage proposal. As we have seen, the rebel Juan Chelemín was put to death in this Andean copy of London.

Ernesto Sabato and Lavalle’s Ride up Humahuaca General Juan Galo de Lavalle (1797-1840) was a hero of the resistance to the dictator Rosas while in Uruguay, where most of the country’s intelligentsia was exiled in the 1840s. He had fought for independence in the Ejército de los Andes, becoming General San Martín’s first sword and had even silenced Bolívar himself simply by touching the hilt of his sword. He was wild, voluble, frivolous and loyal—a typical porteño. Then he took sides in the civil war between the unitarians and the federals. But instead of taking Buenos Aires, he worked his rebel army northwards, defeating the 166

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rosistas in Yeruá in 1839, but then was defeated himself in Sauce Grande. All of northern Argentina was against Rosas, but Lavalle, at the head of a rag-tag, ill-disciplined army, roamed about until finally defeated. He was ill and sleeping in Jujuy, on his way to exile in Bolivia with some two hundred men, when he was accidentally killed in a shoot-out. Ernesto Sabato, a physicist turned writer on the fringe of the Parisian surrealist group, read Lavalle’s death as a symbol of the pointlessness of political passions. Lavalle had had his friend Dorrego shot because politicians in Buenos Aires had told him to do so, but then his guilt ate him up like a cancer, wrote Sabato. He describes him in his straw hat, his once sky-blue poncho and gaucho trousers (bombachas). At the end of his long novel Sobre héroes y tumbas (On Heroes and Tombs, 1966), he shows Lavalle to be a self-deluding dreamer who thinks that he will fight Rosas as a guerrilla in the Andes (like Che Guevara). He rides up the Camino Real towards Potosí in rags, surrounded by the “gigantic mountains and desolate valleys” of the trail towards Jujuy and then La Quiaca, and Bolivia. It is an act of madness, writes Sabato, and then Lavalle is shot. To avoid the enemy spiking his dead head in the main plaza, his faithful soldiers wrap his corpse in a poncho and gallop north. As the general’s dead body decomposes, swells and stinks, his men realize that they must cut its putrid flesh off. They keep Lavalle’s heart in rum, and his head and bones. Lavalle’s soul meanwhile watches and approves, for bones “are the only part of us that approach stone and eternity.”

Andalgalá Andalgalá, a village near the Sierra de Ambato, was visited by the French essayist and publisher Roger Caillois (1913-78) while he found himself trapped in Buenos Aires during the Second World War. At first he was Victoria Ocampo’s much younger lover, and they remained friends for life (their moving correspondence has been published). Caillois was a friend of the surrealist Georges Bataille, knew André Breton and later first published Borges and other Latin Americans in French translation in Paris. In his Cases d’un échiquier (Chessboard Squares, 1970) he evokes the landscape near Andalgalá as covered in candelabra cactuses like a frozen army wounded by thorns. On his way over stony roads to inspect the Capillitas mine, which extract rhodochrosite (the Inca Rose), a mineral that when polished shines in pinks and reds and is sold in egg or animal form to 167

“Like a frozen army covered b thorns” (Caillois): landscape near Tilcara

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tourists, he feels ill, finds a cheap hostel and makes contact with the mine foreman. The next morning, with the illiterate foreman, he drives up over abysses from 2,290 feet to 13,000 feet in twelve miles, then down to the mine at some 11,700 feet. The mine appears abandoned, with a ruined cinema and chapel. He is asked to wear a hard hat and to put on boots (whose stink makes him sick). Finally, he sees the underground rhodochrosite veins. Back in the village, they eat. The mine foreman pretends that he is not surprised that Caillois has come from so far to look at “pink stones”. The mine, we are told, crushes the stones into dust, which is exported to the United States where it is fed to hens to thicken their shells. Caillois remarks: “I was indignant that such a noble stone had such a trivial destiny.” He brought back a stuffed snow owl for Victoria Ocampo. Since his visit, Andalgalá, meaning “from the high mountain” in Quechua, has been at the centre of protests as the massive extraction of gold has poisoned the air and waters.

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The Andan Argentine town of Purmamarca, now a tourist attraction

Chapter Eleven

Argentina/Chile The Open Veins Vast, remote, impenetrable: the Andes have been imagined and depicted in many ways. In recent times, as we shall see, they have been viewed and described from above, from the precarious vantage point of an aeroplane. At the same time the mountains have also been visualized from the inside or beneath, as drilled and hollowed out by mines. Joseph Conrad, in his 1904 novel Nostromo, invented the San Tomé silver mine as the epitome of foreign exploitation of Latin America, as Potosí had been from the sixteenth century onwards. From the emerald mines of Colombia to silver and tin mines in Bolivia and open nitrate mining in Chile, Andean mining exposes what Eduardo Galeano has called Latin America’s “open veins”, his pun on vein alluding to both suffering and geology. Wherever Humboldt wandered testing his scientific curiosity, he was asked about gold mines. A geographic map he had carefully made was, much to his fury, taken by speculators as a map to seduce foreign investors. The search for gold, for El Dorado, emboldened the tough conquistadors and it became one of the driving impulses of colonial greed. Forcing the native Indians into the mines killed millions.

Chuquicamata When Brian Keenan and John McCarthy, fellow former hostages in Beirut, flew into Arica in northern Chile, they were driven to the Lauca National Park past the “world’s highest military base” at 14,239 feet and caught sight of Mount Parinacota at 20,759 feet, near Lake Chungara. They saw mines that once produced nitrate or saltpetre for gunpowder, fertilizer and iodine. Then McCarthy toured the vast copper mine called Chuquicamata, the “biggest open-cast mine in the planet”. He knew that Neruda had been there from his Canto general (but not that Che Guevara had too). The mine is three miles wide, and some 2,500 feet deep and stands 8,840 feet above sea level. It was started in the early twentieth century and in 171

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1990 still had some thirty more years of life. It was not a pleasant sight: Despite the scale the mine is, surprisingly, not exciting but depressing. The refining area is like a city; a nightmare vision of huge sheds, conveyor belts, rock-crushing pyramids, pipes and chimneys spewing smoke and flame. The dull green slag heaps ooze wreaths of black smoke as great trucks crawl across them like cockroaches. It looks what it is, a perversion of nature.

Pablo Neruda attacked its owners, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. He was witness (“In the eternal night of Chuquicamata I saw…”) to the company as a Cyclops devouring Chileans, emptying them of their tepid blood, crushing their skeletons (“triturando los esqueletos”) and spitting them out into the desolate desert. High up in “starry Chuquicamata” the miners, his sons and nephews, are imagined as covered in spit, killed by police, rotting in jails in Pisagua and dying of hunger. Che Guevara was there in 1952 and found the mine beautiful but charmless and cold, making him feel suffocated. The dry mountains, without a blade of grass, were like a grey backbone, he thought, revealing “their real geological age”. He lamented all mines and the poor “unsung heroes” who will die miserable deaths. Guevara then “crudely” summarized the process of copper extraction from dynamiting and crushing to conversion to liquid copper sulphate, electrolysis of the salt and then the smelter. Every night forty-five wagons in convoy took over twenty tons of copper down to Antofagasta on the coast. He mentioned the debate on nationalization and urged his reader, like Neruda, to consider the mine’s graveyard, “which contains but a fraction of the enormous number of people devoured by cave-ins, silicosis and the mountain’s infernal climate” (it was partially nationalized in 1964). Patrick Symmes followed Guevara there on his motorbike forty-four years later and called it an “astoundingly large hole in the desert”; he felt that the crater had hardly changed since 1952.

The Andes from Above: Saint-Exupéry Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-44), born in the French city of Lyon, was a pilot-philosopher. He trained to be a mail courier in 1926, flew the Sahara and inaugurated the flight from Comodoro Rivadavia to Bahía Blanca in Argentina, where he lived for fifteen months. He began writing 173

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one of the world’s biggest selling books, Le Petit prince (1943), while on holiday on Península Valdés. He was married to a Central American, Consuelo Suncín. The 1920s and 1930s were the heroic days of aviation. Blériot’s famous flight across the English Channel took place in 1909. Planes crashed often and it was still a risky calling. Saint-Exupéry recalled one of his mentors, Jean Mermoz, who surveyed the Andes between Santiago and Buenos Aires (there is an Andean peak named after him). His plane’s maximum altitude was 16,000 feet and parts of the mountain range rose to over 20,000, so he had to find gaps between peaks as he paid particular attention to the blustering gusts that sweep between the rocky corridors. Mermoz once ran out of fuel and landed at an altitude of 12,000 feet on a tableland with sheer sides. For two days he roamed this plateau until he was forced to roll the plane over a precipice so that it could pick up enough speed to respond to the controls, like push starting a car with a dead battery. Mermoz later held the record for a mail flight from Toulouse to Buenos Aires of four days. During a storm in the mid Atlantic he crashed but was rescued by a steamer. He disappeared after taking off from Dakar in Senegal on 7 December 1936, and was never found. Also a mentor and friend—male friendship was the pilot’s compensation for risk—was another Frenchman, Henri Guillaumet (again an Andean mountain is named after him). He crashed somewhere in the Andes in June 1930. Saint- Exupéry searched for his missing friend among the endless peaks, slipping in his plane between towering mountain walls in the “silence of a cathedral of snow”. Then Guillaumet staggered into the village of San Rafael. He told his story. He had set off from Chile during a snowstorm, but a down current pushed him away from the gap in the mountains he was aiming for. Spotting a lake called Laguna Diamante near the Maipu volcano, he emptied his fuel tank and landed on the snow. The wind was howling so violently that he could not stand up, so he dug a hole under the fuselage and waited. Then he walked for five days. The sun burned him to a crisp, his hands became numb and his frozen feet two dead weights. He had climbed down the mountain without ropes, ice axe or provisions, scaling cols with his hands and knees bleeding and at twenty degrees below zero. All the while he only wanted to fall asleep in the snow. His sole job was not to think. As he became weaker, he had to cut open his boots to free his swollen feet. His heart started to give out. 174

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Saint-Exupéry reflected on his friend’s story as he sat with him in Mendoza: “‘I swear that what I went through, no animal would have gone through.’ This sentence, the noblest ever spoken, defines man’s place in the universe, honours him, re-establishes the true hierarchy.” Saint-Exupéry had his own tale to tell of flying between Trelew and Comodoro Rivadavia when winds gusted so violently from the Andes, at 150 miles an hour, that they blew his plane out to sea. When he turned to face the winds his plane remained stationary. He recognized a peak called Salamanca, but his heavy transport plane shuddered and then was struck again by the gale and sent hurtling out to sea. Worried about his wings, he was forced down towards the waves, only two hundred feet below him. It seemed hopeless as in twenty minutes of struggle he had advanced a hundred yards against what he thought of as invisible walls of wind. Finally, pouring with sweat despite a temperature of twenty degrees below zero, he managed to land in a field. Years later, in 1944, while flying on behalf of the Free French forces against the Germans, Saint-Exupéry disappeared somewhere near Toulon and was never found. One of the peaks in the spectacular Valle del Torre— according to Fonrouge, pure Gothic fantasy and the most beautiful in the world—is named after Saint-Exupéry. A classic film about mail carriers and their dangerous flights over the Andes is Howard Hawks’ Only Angels have Wings (1939), which he also wrote and produced, with Cary Grant, Jean Arthur and Rita Hayworth. This melodramatic study in machismo and women is also about fate and flying through the high Andean passes in an open biplane in fog, with sudden cliff faces, crags and crashes.

Newbery and Plüschow: The Icarus Syndrome Paul Groussac (1848-1929), the French-born critic who adopted Argentina as home, happened to be in Mendoza in March 1914 at the end of a trip to Chile and the Patagonian Andes when he bumped into Jorge Newbery, then Argentina’s most famous and daring pilot. Newbery, born in 1875, held the world altitude record in a plane in 1914, and was South America’s record holder for the distance he flew in the free-floating balloon called Pampero. Newbery intended to fly across the Andes that day. He was “smilingly rubicund” and “athletically corpulent”, in Groussac’s words. Groussac then went to visit the Cerro de la Gloria close to 176

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Mendoza and viewed its massive bronze and granite monument to the Ejército de los Andes (Army of the Andes), where a winged Liberty leads General San Martín on horseback. Back in his hotel, he heard that Newbery’s monoplane had crashed in nearby Los Tamarindos and that the pilot was dead. He inspected his still warm corpse and admired his still intact “manly beauty”. Newbery had chosen the highest part of the Andes, easily visible from Mendoza, dominated by Aconcagua, Cerro Tupangato (17,958 feet), Cerro Juncal (19,525 feet) and the Volcano San José (19,168 feet), for what was an ill-fated aerial acrobatics display, apparently organized to please some female acquaintances. Today, Buenos Aires’ city airport on the Costanera is named after Newbery. Mendoza is a low-lying town, the centre of the wine-producing area of Argentina. It was founded in 1561 and is has wide and tree-lined avenues and gushing irrigation ditches that date back to its pre-Columbian inhabitants. This is an earthquake zone. In 1861 it was razed, with some 4,000 mendocinos killed. Another earthquake hit the city in 1985, and tremors are constant. The German aviator and photographer Gunther Plüschow had made the first postal flight from Ushuaia in Argentina to Punta Arenas in Chile in 1928, shouting to his co-pilot “I only see ice, ice and more ice.” He returned to Patagonia in 1931 with his plane in parts on a ship and reassembled the Heinkel HD-24 hydroplane, baptized it the “Cóndor de Plata” and was flying over Lago Argentino when his rudder’s cable snapped and his plane plunged into the freezing lake. Both he and his co-pilot died. A glacier in Tierra del Fuego is named after him.

ALIVE: Cannibalism and Survival The Andes are a cemetery of crashed planes, though no accident has struck the public imagination as much as that involving a party of Uruguayan rugby players and friends on 13 October 1972. Catholic novelist Piers Paul Read narrated their ordeal in Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors (1974), telling the harrowing story of how the survivors turned to cannibalism in order to endure seventy days stranded on an Andean peak. Their two-propeller Uruguayan air force Fairchild F227, with forty-five aboard including two women, left Mendoza in the morning as it is dangerous to fly in the afternoon when warm pampa air clashes with cold Andean air. The plane could not fly higher than 22,000 feet so had to follow the 177

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Planchón pass, but the pilot, who had previously crossed the Andes 29 times, became lost in cloud and crashed at around 250 mph, losing a wing and the plane’s tail and skidding to a standstill in deep snow. The wreck lay at 11,500 feet between the Tinguiririca volcano in Chile and the Cerro Sosneado in Argentina, off the map. There were 29 survivors of this first crash, but more soon died of their injuries and then the plane was hit by an avalanche and yet more died. Only sixteen made it at the end. The account of slicing pieces from frozen corpses and cooking them on the fuselage still makes for gruesome reading. The young men were saved by Christian fervour, linking Christ’s command to eat his body and drink his blood with their duty to survive, as if God had put the bodies there for that purpose. In a press conference when they finally admitted their cannibalism, one of them, Pancho Delgado, talked of the “snowcapped peaks—it is majestic, sensational, something frightening—and one feels alone, alone, alone in the world but for the presence of God. For I can assure you that God is there. We all felt it…” Such aloneness above the tree-line in the frozen wasteland of peaks and the consequent intense companionship create a link between the young survivors and the ancient pagan mountain gods, the frozen space nearer to God and gripped by holy terror. Read did a good job, but did not manage to get inside the individuals. Nor did the film Alive, made in 1993 by Frank Marshall (and shot in British Columbia, Canada). Closer was the account by Nando Parrado (Miracle in the Andes: Seventy-Two Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home, 2006), by one of the heroes who walked down the Azufre river into the valley and safety. The best version was the documentary Stranded! The Andes Plane Crash, made 35 years later by the Uruguayan film director Gonzalo Arijón in 2007. It followed the sixteen survivors back to the mass grave on the peak, where they reminisced on survival, psychological damage and God. So far there have been twelve books on the crash and aftermath.

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Argentina/Chile Aconcagua: Sentry of Stone Mount Aconcagua, visible from Mendoza in Argentina and from Valparaíso in Chile, is a volcano on the border between the two countries and stands at 22,835 feet, the highest peak in the Andes (in 1849 Humboldt calculated it at 23,906 feet). In fact, calculating mountain heights, and especially Aconcagua’s, is a variable business, as Roberto Hosne has shown. In 1887 it was deemed to stand at 6,970 metres; in 1897 Edward Fitzgerald recorded it as 7,035; a Chilean border committee settled for 6,960, while the Argentine border committee estimated 7,130. (It is as if Aconcagua is still growing.) In Quechua Aconcagua means “sentry of stone”. According to Loren McIntyre, who trekked 4,700 miles along the Andes, it is relatively easy to scale, although it has claimed over a hundred lives. The main obstacle is the bitterly cold “white wind” that can blow at 125 knots and the wind chill that can send temperatures plummeting to -100°F. I have gazed comfortably at it from the amazing natural bridge known as the Puente del Inca (see p.68), though at the nearby chapel several graves belong to climbers who died trying to conquer it. In 1985 a frozen Inca mummy of a seven- or eight-year-old boy anointed in red dye and well-wrapped in ponchos was found on it at 17,384 feet. According to Hosne, Aconcagua was first climbed in 1897 by the Swiss guide Matias Zürbriggen of the Edward Fitzgerald Expedition. He left an ice axe and a thermometer as evidence. Fitzgerald himself tried several times but failed due to attacks of nausea. Only in 1925 was the summit conquered for the second time, and the thermometer was carried back down (proving that you had climbed a peak was essential). The most colourful climbers of this loftiest summit, in Hosne’s retelling, were George Link and his French wife Adrienne. Not only was she the first woman to scale the peak, but her pet Fifi became the first dog in 1940. Link liked to jokingly show fellow climbers a jar of Aconcagua 179

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mushrooms, which turned out to be his eight cut-off toes which he had sliced off himself with scissors in 1942 after frostbite set in. Both husband and wife finally died high up at 20,000 feet. Rescuers found Adrienne disfigured, clearly having fallen, and George, with neither ice-pick nor goggles sitting frozen to death, seemingly in despair at the fate of his wife. Their dog was never found. Both are buried in the chapel at Puente del Inca. Two journalists (Merle and D’Amico) from La Nación trained in a military altitude laboratory before setting off to scale the peak in 2008, only to find that the summit was a frozen wasteland the size of two tennis courts, as interesting as an empty car park in the sun. (We bring our similes with us.) Not far off is the statue of Christ above the La Cumbre pass at 13,776 feet, erected in 1904 to commemorate Edward VII’s arbitration in the 1902 boundary dispute between the Chile and Argentina. Francis Berry, a Malaysian-born British poet, wrote a long poem called “The Iron Christ” in 1938 about this monument celebrating the peace deal. He addressed Chile as “Chile of the grey-rock ragged slopes/Sliding to tough, roughshaven coast,/A narrow land.” The Argentine climber Fonrouge chose to climb Aconcagua’s south face as it was a bleak 10,000-foot high sheer wall. A French team had encountered death and frostbite, and ran out of water (essential for climbers at such altitudes). He labelled Aconcagua “tragic” for its bleakness, though its easy ascent from the north has attracted eccentrics like the man who dragged up a table, stood on it and claimed to be the tallest man ever or the one who brought up bottles of beer to open the world’s highest bar. As Fonrouge spent a night on a freezing ledge he watched this lunar landscape of grey rocks and scree and found it epitomized sterility. Even worse, when he finally reached the peak after heroic and risky climbing, he found it littered with rusting metal, paper and plastic bags, and then the view from America’s tallest mountain disappointed him: “monotonous peaks as far as the eye could see and hardly any snow.”

San Martín’s Heroic Crossing under Aconcagua In 1814 the Spanish royalists in Chile felt safe, thanks to the high wall of the Andes. Independence had been declared in Argentina, but who would dare cross the impassable mountains and threaten them? The answer was José de San Martín. He had been born to a Spanish mother in Yapeyú, in 181

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the heartlands of riverine Corrientes, and joined the Spanish army in Spain at the age of eleven. Then he switched sides (unlike his three brothers) and vowed to kick the “godos” (Goths) out of America, which he did, helping to liberate Chile and Peru. He then famously met Simón Bolívar in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and without explanation withdrew from public life. He was always austere, rejecting riches, an impenetrable man living the tough military life like a celibate monk, wrote his biographer Ricardo Rojas. He was also often ill, with asthma, dyspepsia, coughing up blood (his young wife died of TB) and rheumatism. He was an opium addict. He also suffered from disnea (breathing difficulties). His vision was to climb over the snowy Andes. In 1814 he was appointed military governor of Mendoza and began the preparations. His sole daughter was born there in 1816, the year he founded the Army of the Andes. He carefully built up this force from 180 to 5,000 men, obtained the required amount of ponchos, 2,000 sabres and charqui (jerked beef ) and melted church bells into cannons—everything had to be transported by mules, even the mules’ fodder. He needed information about the passes from Indians, and told a gathering of caciques that “I too am an Indian.” Indeed, he was slandered as a “black”, and was dark-skinned and had jetblack eyes and long, straight black hair. In Peru he would liberate the Indians from the encomiendas and slavery. By late 1816 he was ready for the crossing. It took 24 days, and cost many lives. Some 10,600 mules left Mendoza but only 4,300 arrived in Chile, while 1,600 horses were reduced to 511. He himself crossed through the Los Patos pass with the bulk of his army (3,000 men) in his military uniform lined with nutria fur. It hailed, the wind howled and it was icy. Rojas has it that San Martín (the “san”, short for “santo”—saint, hence his nickname “the saint of the sword”) deliberately slept on the highest point, the frontier, looking up at Aconcagua, since the Andes were “the spine of America”. After drinking brandy and playing the national anthem he then descended, met his second-in-command Las Heras, who had crossed over the more used pass at Upsallata with 800 men, and defeated the Spanish at the Battle of Chacabuco on 12 February 1817. He lived for three years in Chile preparing his fleet to attack Lima, the capital of the Spanish colonies, by sea, which he finally did in 1821. San Martín crossed the Andes seven times in all in his life, and Samuel Haigh, a Scottish merchant who met him, called him the Hannibal of the 182

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Andes. The feat of taking an army over three high unknown passes was due to his insistence, organization and toughness. In fact, historians like Carlos Alberto Floria and César García Belsunce define his genius as organizational, down to details like the establishment of a travelling hospital. The Andes, for San Martín, were a symbol of American freedom—so much so that Ricardo Rojas interprets the blue and white Argentine flag as a “distant view of white snow and blue skies”.

“Galloping” Head and the Andean Passes Sir Francis Bond Head (1793-1879) wrote his “rough notes” about gaucho life on the pampas in 1826 when he was a mining engineer (he later became Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada). It is a racy, prejudiced, anti-Catholic account that Charles Darwin much admired. His crossing of the Andes began after the usual six-hour siesta in oppressive heat in Mendoza. After the mules were loaded and Head was armed, they rode past irrigated land with peach trees along the Alameda road. Soon they reached the dry Andean foothills and stunted shrubs. Already in darkness, the group halted at Villa Vicencia, simply a solitary hut without a window and with a bullock hide for a door, where Head, nicknamed “Galloping”, used a horse skull for a pillow and fell asleep. The next day he visited the baths and was shocked to see men and women mixed, with one naked woman in a hole in the ground. He bathed in the warm thermal waters. Today Villavicencia has a grand hotel and is the source of a famous mineral water that depicts the Andes on its label (the mountains and purity of water are almost synonymous). The group then rode up a ravine into the Andes, along barren slopes where it never rained. One of the Cornish miners picked up some green, barren soil and insisted that “there must be poison in this ground.” They took the Ladera de las Vacas pass and crossed the Vacas river under the sharp-edged pinnacles (there is no mention of Aconcagua). Finally they climbed down from the snow to La Villa Nueva de los Andes in Chile. Santiago he found full of priests, and “the people are consequently indolent and immoral.” He soon travelled back up the Andes to visit a silver-mine at San Pedro Nolasco, high up the Maipo Valley. Crossing a suspension bridge of hideropes and admiring the way the mules preserved their balance and footing, he climbed the steep mountain of San Pedro Nolasco for five hours and reached the mine. He was astonished that this mine was ever discovered 183

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and described it as “the most dreadful scene which in my life I have witnessed.” Head climbed into the mine down notched poles for some two hundred and fifty feet, and was impressed by the strength of the workers, who carried their heavy hammers and sacks of mineral samples back up which he could barely lift from the ground: “we had never seen Englishmen possess such strength or work so hard.” When they finally clambered out, one of the Cornish miners nearly fainted in the freezing air and altitude. These miners worked a 24-hour shift, ate dried meat and only drank water. They did not talk, and slept on sheepskins. In his report Head advised against investing in Andean mines. Like many, he found mining silver “one of the most guilty pages in the moral history of man.” Crossing the Andes on foot was a heroic undertaking in the days before maps. One of the earliest attempts was in 1535 by Diego de Almagro, who set off from Cuzco to conquer the southern regions of the ex-Inca empire (Chile). He lost 150 fellow Spaniards and 10,000 Indians up in the altiplano along Lake Titicaca’s shore. He reached Salta and then crossed the Andes from there through the San Francisco Pass (reckoned to be 15,585 feet high) where he lost a further two Spaniards, 1,500 Indians and 112 horses, with most of the survivors frostbitten. Isabel Allende, in her historical novel Inés de mi alma, imagines this ordeal: “He described the terrifying march across the high sierra, watched by condors circling slowly above their heads and waiting for them to drop so that could pick their bones. The cold killed more than two thousand auxiliary Indians—the ones they call Yanaconas—two hundred blacks, nearly fifty Spaniards and quantities of horses and dogs. Even the lice and fleas could not endure the cold, but fell from the men’s clothing like showers of little seeds.”

Bariloche The lakeside town of Bariloche, under huge volcanoes and close to Argentina’s border with Chile, has always been a place for foreigners, and Swiss, Austrians and Germans, sprinkled with fugitive Nazis, have settled there—so much so that Borges refused to go because it was not “Argentina”. The land was “liberated” or ethnically cleansed of belligerent Indians by General Roca in 1879 and San Carlos de Bariloche founded in 1898. Paul Groussac, the French-born, sharp-tongued literary critic and later director of the National Library in Buenos Aires, was there in 1914. He pedantically claimed it should be called Vuriloche. In Mapuche it 184

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means, so he informs us, land of the cannibals. But Edison Vergara links it etymologically to a mountain pass or vurilo, behind the mountains and che, meaning people. The Mapuche knew how to cross the Andes before the Spanish arrived. Then Europeans from Chile traversed the Andes seeking the “enchanted city of the Caesars”, a fabulous Inca city of golden walls and domes lost in Patagonia, named in 1528 after one Francisco César, who claimed he saw this mythic place, sometimes also called Trapalanda, possibly on Lake Nahuel Huapi. According to Edward Goodman, the first to see the lake was Diego Flores de León in 1621 when he crossed the Andes along Río Peulla. There was a further attempt by Captain Ponce de León and then an Italian Jesuit Niccolò Mascardi (who brought apple trees), who while also seeking the city of the Caesars tried to convert the Poya Indians on the lake shore in 1671. After he was killed at about 47° south, nobody could re-find the pass until a Chilean named Barrios crossed over in 1900, after “Perito” Moreno had guessed where it was. Groussac thought it without interest or character, some hundred wooden houses,

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but with a deliciously fresh climate. He visited the town’s only historical relic, a chained off gigantic cypress to which Moreno (see below) had been supposedly tied by the cacique Shaihueque. Bariloche today is a dull, grid town with fake Swiss houses, hotels and garish tourist shops. Like many porteños, Victoria Ocampo was ignorant of her own country to the south and considered herself an anti-tourist, but she finally took the train from Constitución station in Buenos Aires. She lodged in the still-existing and grand Bustillo-designed hotel of Llao-Llao (the name of the spongy, edible fruit of the coihue) on Lake Nahuel Huapi and felt she was on another planet. She marvelled at the sheer size of the lake, its forests of coihues and lengas and at the silence. (She was there before tourism and skiing.) She was particularly struck by the snow-capped, volcanic Cerro Tronador, meaning “thundering” because of the sound of ice cracking in its ten glaciers. This peak, holy to the Mapuche Indians, separates Chile from Argentina. The missionary friar Menéndez was the first white to write about its “continuous thundering”. For a long time it was seen as invincible, especially as a German mountaineer called Federico Reichert tried and failed eight times to scale it. Only in 1934 did Hermann Claussen finally climb to the top, alone. He spent the night there after cutting ice steps up the sheer face of the needle. He left a piece of deer skin on a wire and his name and a line from a poem carved into cypress wood. That same year two Italian climbers died trying to scale the ice cap over the vertical granite peak. How many climbers have died as martyrs to the Andes? In 1937 one of the area’s most famous climbers, Otto Meiling, scaled Cerro Tronador, aged eighty. Edison Vergara reminds us that the sacred Tronador did have an Indian name, Tralca Mahuida. Perhaps it should be renamed. Behind Llao Llao, where Victoria Ocampo stayed in that grand hotel, is another mountain which Perito Moreno, himself a great namer of peaks and lakes (ignoring Indian names), called the Cerro López, at 6,795 feet. It could hardly be a more common name, but in fact it celebrates Vicente López y Planes, the composer of the national anthem. Behind this mountain lies another hitherto apparently nameless lake he baptized Lake Gutiérrez, after his mentor the poet and educationalist, Juan María Gutiérrez. The view of the Cerro Catedral from there is awesome in its nakedness and bulk. For Moreno, all these patriotic names meant that one was reminded of national history by looking at natural history. 186

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The Cerro Catedral, twelve miles from Bariloche and now a famous ski-centre, was so named by that brave, travelling missionary Menéndez in 1791 as he saw its peaks as the Gothic spires of God’s natural cathedral. It has two particular towers that were seen as impossible to climb with their smooth, vertical sides. One was only climbed in 1943 by Pablo Fischer and Gustavo Kammerer, who in a Moreno-style gesture, left the Argentine flag under a stone at the top. The second needle, the “Campanile”, was scaled in 1952. We took the train, just before the line was closed, from Buenos Aires one January in 1991. The slow train took thirty-six hours to reach Bariloche. Then suddenly, like Ocampo, we saw Lake Nahuel Huapi with its waves and the wind bending the trees. It was summer, but freezing, and it even snowed. The lake lies nearly 3,000 feet high and covers an area of 204 square miles. Nahuel Huapi meant Island of the Tiger (or puma) in Tehuelche. The deep waters are so cold they gave me a headache when I tried to swim. And it rains constantly; nearer the Chilean border a sign announces the rainiest spot in the world. In 1876 Francisco P. Moreno was sent by the Sociedad Científica Argentina to follow the River Limay to its source in Lake Nahuel Huapi, the first “white” to do so from the east. Mascardi, the Jesuit priest, attempted to found a mission there in 1670, but was lanced to death by Indians. He left apple trees that multiplied and became the basis for local chicha, and a small lake named after him. In 1703 another mission was established, and again the priest was killed. Moreno returned to the lake in 1879-80, but was captured by the cacique Shaihueque. His life was at stake, but during one of the Indians’ drinking sprees he escaped on horseback, tying a poncho to the horse’s tail so as to sweep his tracks away. He then strung logs together and drifted down the Collón Cura river to safety. Only in 1881 were the military sent in under Colonel Conrado Villegas. The Indians could not compete with his Remington rifles and were slaughtered. Moreno was the last to see them living in their tents. Moreno lived with the Mapuche Indians in a valley at the foot of the mountain called Tchilchiuma, meaning “water that drips”. He found their food disgusting—raw livers, lungs and kidneys of horses and handfuls of lice—but had to swallow whatever he was given. He hated sleeping in their tents because of the bedbugs, and found the women “repugnant, infernal witches”. Like most observers of Andean Indians, he found that the 187

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Mapuche (meaning people of the fields) loved getting drunk, especially during the apple harvest celebrations that lasted as long as eight days. The women cooked and wove the ponchos while the men lolled about, talking of war, women and horses. Moreno witnessed a great parliament (aucantrahun) where 500 horsemen spent ten hours questioning him, but he convinced them that they should let him explore the lake and the Cerro Tronador. The Indians believed the mountains hid evil spirits, dwarves and witches preventing them from climbing and exploring. In order to investigate Moreno promised them that he would be struck by lightning if he had lied about his intentions. Later, he claimed that the lake was the most beautiful in Patagonia, ringed by apple tree woods. He would never forget, he wrote, the nights he slept there in the open, feeling how petty he was in comparison with the mountains and lakes. In 1903 Moreno donated his immense lands (twenty-five square leagues) to the state as the first national park of Argentina. In Bariloche an excellent anthropological museum, the Museo de la Patagonia, is part dedicated to Moreno. The Indian whom Moreno met four times and who kidnapped him, was called Valentín Santiago Shaihueque (1818-1903), baptized a Christian after surrendering to government forces in 1885 at Junín de los Andes. He was known as the King of the Apple Country and had three wives. His home was the Collón Cura valley, now a dammed lake, where his tribe grew potatoes, maize and collected apples and pine kernels. The Argentine army traced him to this valley and captured his livestock of 800 cattle, 6,000 sheep and over 400 horses. In a retake of the Pizarro/Atahualpa collision, Shaihueque—who had never attacked whites—and his tribe were dispersed around Argentina, many ending up on sugar estates in the north and the women as servants to Buenos Aires. He was exiled in Chubut, where he died. On his death certificate his profession was noted as “cacique”. In 1936 the Cerro Shaihueque, 6,936 feet high, was named after him. Paul Groussac crossed the Andes from Chile in 1914. He took a fivehour ferry trip across Chile’s largest lake, Llanquihue, home to German colonists. The lake was so transparent he could see its bottom deep down. From Petrohue he took a horse and cut through dense, wet woods, with wild fuchsias and giant ferns, under the Osorno and Calbuco volcanoes. He then crossed the Lago Esmeralda, a green gem, he wrote, and traversed the Pérez Rosales pass at 3,502 feet into Argentina before taking a boat 188

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ride across the small Lago Frío and then an ox-hauled train to Puerto Blest on the great Nahuel Huapi. Apart from the ox, this is still the trail. Crossing Lake Nahuel Huapi was, for Groussac, “enchanting”, as the fresh air and utter silence stunned him. It still today seems so massive and free of human traces that it takes your breath away. On his way back to Puerto Blest he stopped at the Isla Victoria, a “colossal saurian covered in luxurious vegetation”. Called Nahuel Huapi by the Indians who used it to grow potatoes, quinoa and beans, this long island was renamed in 1856 by a Swiss-born explorer after the missionary Fray Menéndez. It was renamed again, so poor were the maps, by another explorer O’Connor in 1884 after the then war minister, General Benjamín Victoria, and changed by popular use, thankfully, to Isla Victoria. One of Argentina’s richest men, Aaron Anchorena, leased it from the government, despite it belonging to Moreno’s donated national park, and stocked the island with wild boar and deer so that he could hunt. He also felled the great trees. All that is left of that experiment is a small, abandoned cemetery. Back on shore, Groussac aimed to climb the Tronador, but a storm frustrated his attempt.

Osorno Volcano From Puerto Montt in Chile, Patrick Symmes climbed into the Andes on his motorbike, nicknamed Kooky (a BMW R80 G/S for those in the know, and purpose built for following the Che Guevara trail). The volcanic peak of Osorno, at 8,680 feet, was still active but covered by “tablecloth-white snowfields”. It had erupted eleven times between 1575 and the last occasion in 1869. He followed the road up to the side of the volcano, by Lake Todos los Santos and passed a solitary hotel and a few shacks in a “village” called Petrohué, built for Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to Chile in 1968. He stood examining the circle of mountains, Osorno, Puntiagudo and Puyehue, glimpsed by Groussac on his way to Argentina. Symmes noted that it was the “most beautiful view I had ever seen.” From the island of Chiloé in 1832, Charles Darwin made out the Osorno volcano “spouting volumes of smoke” and also called it “the most beautiful” of mountains because of its perfect cone (and flat top). Today, you can climb it in six hours with a guide and crampons. Darwin actually saw Osorno erupt at night from the Beagle, hurling out “dark objects” seen through a telescope, a “very magnificent spectacle”. He wrote in his diary that Aconcagua (480 miles north) erupted the same night, wondering 189

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whether it was a coincidence or some subterranean connection. Hans Steffen, a member of the Chilean boundary commission, was the first white to explore Lake Todos los Santos, and measure the Osorno cone in 1893.

The Patagonian Andes and Perito Moreno When we once crossed the great Nahuel Huapi Lake on our way to the Chilean border, I told the ferry’s captain that my mother-in-law was related to Perito Moreno. As we passed the simple, white cross, together with flag pole and Argentine flag where his remains were re-buried in 1944 on the Isla Centinela—named after another of his monikers, Sentinel of Argentine Sovereignty—the captain sounded the ship’s hooter and announced this patriotic fact over the loudspeakers. Francisco P. Moreno (1852-1919) made several trips down into the Patagonian Andes, starting in 1873. In 1879 he published his account of his fourth journey—one month up the Santa Cruz river and 23 hours down. He was driven, he wrote, to reveal an overlooked patria. Moreno was an autodidact who learned as he travelled, a man of action, carting a “trunk of books” up the Santa Cruz to the icy lakes. He aimed to live with the Indians in their own huts and gather only empirical facts, far more useful than reading travel books, which do not always abound in truth. Moreno called himself an anthropologist and was as excited by age-old bones as by living Indians. He promised a second volume on his anthropological findings following the 1879 travel account, which never appeared. My guess is that General Julio Roca’s desert war or pogrom of that same year, 1879, led Moreno to depression and writer’s block. The trip up the Santa Cruz was stimulated by Fitzroy and Darwin’s failures in the two earlier Beagle voyages of 1826-30 and 1834. This is crucial, because as much as he admired Darwin and copied out whole passages to replace his own impressions, and as much as he travelled with Darwin’s Beagle book as a guide, he also competed with him as a patriot against a foreigner. On 13 April 1834 the Beagle had anchored in the mouth of the Santa Cruz, where Captain Fitzroy decided to try again to locate the source of the fast-flowing river. He led three whaleboats upstream, with 25 men and three weeks’ provisions on 19 April, with Darwin aboard. This little journey offered the classic explorer’s lure of terra incognita. Darwin wrote to his sister Catherine before the trip: “I cannot 190

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imagine anything more interesting.” Even if the Patagonian Andes remained the “same dreary landscape” as ever, as the men pulled the boats upstream Darwin let his curiosity range, especially over the geology. He became “almost giddy” reflecting on the centuries needed to shape the mountains and reaching what Robert Macfarlane called his awareness of “deep time”. On 4 May, within sight of the Andes, Fitzroy ordered them to turn back and descend in one day what had taken five and a half to ascend. A third traveller had also pulled his boat upstream, but he was an Argentine, not a foreigner and did reach the nameless lake that feeds the Santa Cruz river. In his travelogue Moreno is strangely silent about Valentín Feilberg, a naval officer who left an oar with a flag and a written message in a bottle but who did not chronicle his 1873 trip (as far as I know), and who did not manage to sail on the lake. Feilberg would later explore the Iguazú falls in 1883 and the Pilcomayo in 1884 and ended up a rear admiral (later, in 1899, Moreno did acknowledge him). So Moreno outdid Darwin, but not Feilberg, and his claim to have “discovered” the lake is based on his having first sailed on the water that the local Indians believed cursed. Moreno’s vision of Patagonia is coloured by his “practical patriotism”. He was a 24-year-old nobody, daring to disagree with the greatest scientist alive at the time (Darwin died in 1882). Darwin never read these criticisms of his alleged topographical inaccuracies, though he corresponded with one of Moreno’s colleagues, Francisco Javier Muñiz. There was territoriality at stake. Moreno spent five months on the Santa Cruz and was Argentine, while Darwin was a foreigner who passed through. More importantly, Moreno did drag his boat up the river and did sail on the glacial lake, which he named Lago Argentino. Yet Moreno was genuinely ambivalent about how to treat the Indians he met—and respected—before the ethnic cleansing initiated by Roca. He was unable, in his words, to really choose between the “yells” of the caciques and the “whistle” of the trains of the future. He met a cacique with a quillango, a wooden mask and a tattered umbrella; he joked with matches, or about his glasses (he was seen as four eyed and evil). He watched the cacique Collohue listen to some opera and imitate it with his “Patagonian yells”. Moreno saw the future of the Andean Indians as similar to that of the gauchos, incorporated into his beloved patria, their drink191

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ing bouts domesticated into workers’ holidays, but he could do nothing to stop the massacre. In 1916 (37 years later), he lamented that “a virile and useful race was destroyed.” He saw himself as the last witness to their life: “for I was the last traveller who knew them before that unconsulted annihilation of those tribes…” Moreno faced whatever happened without fear: an attack by a puma, falling into a freezing lake or finding a red-painted mummy in foetal position in a cave. This last find he likened to Peruvian mummies, also painted in cochineal red but here wrapped in ostrich skins, with stone knives to hand and a beautiful black condor feather. The mummy faced downwards, staring into the cave’s dark depths, while one hand clutched a handful of earth. He took the mummy home and kept it in his museum, now the famous Museo de La Plata. Later Moreno earned the nickname “Perito” (skilled) thanks to his clever negotiations with Chile over defining the frontier between the neighbouring countries along the Andes. Each side had a different scientific position and no survey had been made of the actual watershed. The Argentines opted for lines drawn along the mountains’ crests, while the Chileans thought the continental divide counted. In 1902 the British monarch Edward VII adjudicated that Moreno’s position was sounder. Moreno had spent the years 1882 to 1895 examining the Andes and had crossed over to Chile on mule with his large family through the Upsallata pass and stayed to study the watershed when his young wife suddenly died of tuberculosis. He even ascended the Santa Cruz river a second time in 1898. By then he was the solemn and “conservative” man whose actions possibly cheated Chile of territory in the ongoing border dispute. At the end of his life Moreno concluded: “Nothing impresses more the traveller than these great solitudes, the severe nature of these sites is printed in my imagination.” He left his initials carved on a rock face and a message in a bottle by the lake with the Argentine flag.

Onelli’s Andes Clemente Onelli was born in Rome in 1864. In 1889 Perito Moreno employed him in the Museo de La Plata and sent him off for a year to Patagonia to collect fossils. He not only learned Spanish, but native languages too, befriending Tehuelche caciques. Onelli was also a journalist, covering the building of the railway to Neuquén. Then Moreno named him secre192

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tary to the boundary commission, where in 1900 he worked for three months with Colonel Sir Thomas Hungerford Holdich, the British crown arbiter, establishing the 1,375-mile frontier between Chile and Argentina along the highest peaks of the Andes. Holdich is remembered now in the name of a railway station in the altiplano on the way to Colonia Sarmiento. The border had been bitterly fought over for sixty years as Chile claimed Patagonia, tempers flared and war threatened until the respective presidents met in Punta Arenas and agreed to British crown arbitration over four tricky areas. In all, 306 boundary posts were to be erected, of which 303 were agreed. Perito Moreno led the Argentine delegation with Holdich, after two visits to London with Onelli as his secretary. The disputed border posts in San Francisco in the Puna de Atacama, at the watershed of Lake Lácar and around Lake Nahuel Huapi, and the Tronador peak, were agreed and placed. The final agreement was the work of Moreno and his Chilean antagonist Barros Arana. The first boundary post was erected in 1894 and the rest followed, in often appalling conditions. The heroic creation of a border lies behind Onelli’s horseback ride along the Patagonian Andes, narrated in Trepando los Andes (1904). At times his account is flowery but Andean reality is never far away. Paying little attention to himself (apart from his hunger), he created the persona of yet another imperturbable male scientist-hero. He bargained with a Tehuelche cacique he knew and rode off with a pack of horses and two young Indian guides who accompany him as shadows (we never know their names). He is not specific about purpose or about place (he generalizes and did not take copious notes), but his insights into landscape and lifestyle are gripping. With his Kodak camera, dried meat, matchboxes wrapped in silver foil, machete and hunting weapons, Onelli rode from Chos Malal, where the round snow cap of the gigantic Lanín volcano suddenly emerged between clouds, to the freezing Lake Nahuel Huapi. He crossed the Limay river, then Lake Traful and reached the little fort of San Martín de los Andes. Here his text focuses on the first of several unsung heroes of the boundary posts, whose names might be meaningless but not their self-sacrificial work. For example, an engineer named Frey charted seventy lakes around Río Manso and ran out of names, calling them Lake One, Lake 193

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Two, etc. While on the Fetaleufú river, one of his makeshift boats sank in rapids and eleven men died (he never found the corpses). Another was the Norwegian Gunardo Lange, father of the writer Norah Lange, one of Borges’ loves. A third was the Swede Juan Hogberg, a ship’s captain intimate with the Patagonian fiords, who sailed his boat Los Andes on Lago San Martín, discovered by Perito Moreno in 1879, and coped with the sudden, violent winds. He had been attacked by an old puma, which left him with three gold teeth, scars and a puma rug. Indeed, Onelli himself had to bury an aged Indian who had frozen to death near the Pico de las Vacas. Onelli was observant regarding the Tehuelche Indians. Near El Bolsón he stayed with the cacique Ñancuche Nahuelquir, whose hard-working people defied stereotypes about apathy and Indian “fakirism”. He borrowed two trail finders—baqueanos—who led him south along tracks until they reached the “labyrinths” of the mountains where one of them said to him, “you now trail finder.” He describes a typical tent as made of guanaco leather painted on the inside, a fire always lit and leather skins on the floor. Fifteen to twenty people slept there with their heads in a circle in the middle (like a wheel). He also recorded their death ceremonies (which no white could watch): a cacique was buried with his weapons and his horse, but all his other possessions were burnt. They believed in an evil force, located in Mount Chaltén, which Moreno re-baptized Fitzroy (see p.205). Later, back home, Onelli recalled the “bitter smell” of these tents with nostalgia. After describing the beauty of the glacier breaking up into blue and turquoise icebergs on Lago Argentino—now a tourist must-see in Argentina—Onelli commented on the reaction of his two Indian companions: The impassivity of my Indians was notable when faced with the spectacle of unforgettable beauty; their faces had the same indifference as when we crossed pampas and pampas, moors of stones, bogs covered with green and desolate sand dunes; their eyes would only come alive when they saw the fat covering the hunted ostrich’s neck.

Onelli was stuck in his time, a believer in progress and an avid hunter of animals, but he also captured something about the Andes before tourism 194

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conditioned the region’s images. In 1904 he became director of the Buenos Aires zoo, wrote popular sketches called Aguafuertes zoológicas, and died in 1924.

The Mapuche Today’s Mapuche burst into European consciousness as Araucanians. The word mapuche means “people of the land”, while the Spanish term for them, araucano, derived from auca, meaning “free”. We know something of their early contact with Europeans thanks to Alonso de Ercilla (153393), a Spanish nobleman who fought the Araucanians in Chile and wrote his verse epic (in octava real), the Araucana, in three parts between 1569 and 1590. Most striking today is Ercilla’s sympathy for these tough warriors, so much so that his portrayal of Caupolicán and his lieutenant Lautaro has turned them into symbols of resistance and patriotism, resuscitated by Pablo Neruda in his Canto general. Ercilla was there, on the spot, pen and sword in hand from 1555 to 1563 when he reached Chiloé. He had heard about the Araucanians while with the future Philip II in London. He claimed that his account was “infalliblye true”, in George Carew’s late sixteenth-century prose translation. From the opening of the work it is clear that the Andes are the Mapuche heartland. They knew the mysterious mountain passes and lived on both sides of the chain. In fact, the Andes are directly linked to their military prowess. We read that “there first Exercise is to runne for wadgers to the Toppes of steepe and Craggie Mountanes.” These runs made them swift and nimble, and Neruda imagined that Andean snow was a weapon on their side, freezing the hands off the Spanish “like a bonfire of whiteness”. At first, like all American indigenous peoples, they found the Spaniards’ horses terrifying, but soon adapted to the creatures. Ercilla, a proto-anthropologist, noted their feasts and alcoholic binges, and how they worshipped the “divell” called Eponamon. Their priests fasted and were held in awe (one Colocolo features as a wise shaman in the epic). They did not grasp the concepts of sin or immortality and only valour was held in esteem. Ercilla summed them up as “cruell, bloodie, impatient and addicted to warre”, remarking that a man frequently solved an argument by braining another with a club. Cold did not bother them, and they had never been conquered, defeating the Incas, and then the Spanish. They did, however, listen to signs from the Andes, especially “lighteinge”, 195

Vintage engraving of Mapuche

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“rayne”, earthquake and thunder: “suche prodigious accidents pronostiicatt yll fortune to them sellves.” Lautaro, who reappears as a cunning interpreter and traitor to his Spanish master Valdivia in Isabel Allende’s novel Inés del alma mía, knew the Spanish mind well, and the Araucanians stole and adapted their clothes and weapons. Legend has it that when Valdivia was captured, he was killed by pouring molten gold down his gullet. Ercilla in fact narrates several gruesome deaths, including Lautaro’s in 1557, shot through the heart by an Indian archer. Finally, Caupolicán, “lord of Pilmayquen” also dies heroically, impaled (in 1558), but not before his wife Fresia accuses him of cowardice for not having killed himself first and dashes their child to death at his feet (not in Carew’s unfinished translation). Looking for national heroes in his Cold-War epic, the Canto general, Pablo Neruda picked on Caupolicán and Lautaro. In the poem “Cacique’s Education”, he evokes Lautaro as one who “lived in the caves in the snow/he waylaid the eagle’s food./He scratched the secrets from the peaks.” Isabel Allende has Lautaro appear as an eleven-year-old boy, baptized Felipe, who becomes a skilled hunter and a horse whisperer. The Mapuche, she writes, would meet in special ceremonies called Nguillatún on an enormous hilltop amphitheatre “in the haughty presence of the volcanoes and peaks of the cordillera, besides emerald lakes and the foaming rivers of melted snow.” Inés, her protagonist, sums up the Mapuche as lacking any interest in gold, scorning possessions, feeding off fish, fruit and nuts, and not knowing fear. They had no prisons, no police, respected their leaders, but only obeyed natural law. They considered the invading whites or huincas as “liars and land thieves”. Hosne observed how they dipped their lances in urine and smeared ostrich fat over their naked bodies to keep warm. They were so tough that they walked barefoot in winter snow (like the Aymara up at Lake Titicaca). He told the story of one Mapuche chief, Purrán, who was captured by Argentines on the banks of the Bío Bío river and was held for eight years on the island of Martín García just outside Buenos Aires, until allowed out when he revealed the whereabouts of a mine. He finally admitted that the mine was near Ranquilón in Neuquén, but on the way there at night he escaped back across the cordillera. The dual-pronged genocide known in Argentina as the War of the Desert and in Chile as the Pacification of the Araucaria, when the Mapuche, who had merged with the Tehuelche, were pushed back off their 197

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land into towns, ended what Leslie Ray called the Mapuche’s golden age (1793-1881). They had tamed the horse and become fine silversmiths and traders, crossing the Andes through secret passes at will, usually to steal horses and women and herd them back to Chile. In fact, Ray asserts that they had never seen themselves as “divided by the supposedly ‘natural’ barrier of the Andes.” Today, they are essentially urban, with 44 per cent recorded as living around Santiago and some 100,000 in Bariloche and Neuquén. They speak mapudungun, produce their own rock music, protest against landowners like the transnational company Benetton and have poets who strive to assert Mapuche identity. One last symbol of the Araucanians is the now suburbanized monkey-puzzle tree or araucaria, whose pine-nut or pewen formed the staple food of the Mapuche.

Aucanquilcha and Llullaillaco The volcanic cone of Aucanquilcha, which stands in northern Chile close to the border with Bolivia at 20,262 feet, was until the 1990s the site of the Andes’ highest mine. From 1913 Bolivian miners worked at heights of up to 18,000 feet extracting sulphur that was transported to Chuquicamata and turned into sulphuric acid. Llamas were first used to carry the sulphur down and were replaced by an aerial cable system before a road for trucks was constructed. Loren McIntyre climbed there in 1973, bringing back down a NASA engineer who had frozen to death up on the top. He surveyed an endless vista of conical peaks—god-mountains without worshippers, he wrote—and added that the Incas sacrificed children to the sun high up on Aucanquilcha’s summit. Another volcanic giant is 22,110-foot Llullaillaco, straddling the Chile/Argentina border and overlooking the valleys of Calchaquíes and Salta. On the way up, at 17,061 feet, is the highest archaeological site in the Andes containing a stone corral, an altar and scattered bits and pieces of handiwork. A sacrificial boy victim, maybe eight years old, was found there in a foetal position, with a sling, extra sandals for his long journey and an overlarge tunic into which he could grow. Two more girls were found in 1998 by Johan Reinhard, who called them the Llullaillaco children. One of them had coca leaves stuffed under her nostrils, while the other had seemingly been struck by lightning. The closest Inca centre to this peak is in Chile, today the town of San Pedro de Atacama but then called Catarpe, lying at 7,990 feet. It is an oasis and the conquistadors 198

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Almagro and Valdivia stayed there. Graham Greene, according to Ben Box, visited the local museum, admired the mummies and said that “it puts the British Museum in the shade.”

The Andes Imagined (10): Marta Brunet’s MONTAÑA ADENTRO

The aristocratic Marta Brunet (1901-67) wrote her exquisite and laconic dialogue novel Montaña adentro (The Inner Mountain) when she was 22. In this compact novel, hailed as the first feminist fiction in Chile, she explores the lives of women in the Chilean Andes some fifty miles from Temuco. She catches how peasant women think as they cook, weave and bring up illegitimate children while the men work relentlessly on the land under brutal overseers. Migrant workers pass through, called fuerinos (from afuera, outside) sleeping fully dressed on straw with their archaic sandals called ojotas still on. They gamble and drink. The young unmarried mother glimpses happiness when a different kind of man helps her cure her sick baby, but an ex-lover turns up drunk and stabs her new man in the back. Fatalism rules their lives; Brunet’s rural poor accept whatever happens with “equal calm”, whether happiness, sadness, sickness or death. There is no point in rebelling against ignorance, poverty, evil instincts or even crime. Instead they dance the cueca, eat cazuela and drink wine. The title of the novel points to where such fatalism comes from: inside the mountain. Brunet is geographically precise. She mentions the Quillén river, the village of Rari-Ruca on the Cautín river, the vega, the woods of pines. There are moments of natural calm where streams talk to the trees and laugh, and woods are coloured by fuchsia, chupones and maquis. After the protagonist’s new man has been beaten up for daring to defy the local carabinero and ex-smuggler (ironically misnamed San Martín), she takes him on a long cart ride. They slowly climb a “bitter slope”, along a dynamited path under a precipice to the town under green-black, desolate and jagged mountains. Dominating the whole human scene is one volcano, Llaima, at 10,253 feet. It seems to stand alone, covered in snow, with two craters and a constantly smoking fumarole. It erupted in January 2008, sending a spire of smoke 9,000 feet into the air. As Brunet noted, this volcano is constantly “plumed” with very light smoke. So what did she mean by “inner mountain”? My guess is that she was referring to the volcano’s destructive power that humans can do little to 199

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prevent; the mountain is thus equated with a negative inner power that renders the individual helpless. She observed that Christianity meant nothing to her female characters, except the fear of hell—and their version of hell lies inside the mountain.

Llaima volcano

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Argentina/Chile Poets, Patriots and Prisoners Up the Elqui valley from Gabriela Mistral’s birthplace in Vicuña sits the “alabaster dome” of an observatory on the Cerro Tololo complete with four-metre telescope and six smaller domes. Gabriela Mistral, born Lucila Godoy Alcayaga in 1889, was brought up in a school-teaching, womenonly atmosphere. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945 after a long life outside Chile as diplomat or educationalist. The waterless Elqui valley, under the magic mountains, is reworked into her poems as a symbol of pessimism and sterility. She felt close to Buddhism and disliked the city, the upper class and fashion-conscious intellectuals. For six years between 1912 and 1918 she lived in a village called Los Andes. She was very private and religious; writing for her was “talking to herself in her solitude.” She always lived with other women, and felt happiest in Mexico working under the post-revolutionary education minister José Vasconcelos. Later she met the Peruvian activist Ciro Alegría and became fascinated with Quechua folktales. Her poem-lullaby “Quechua Song” laments the arrival of European wheat and cattle at the expense of maize and vicuñas in a land “with its air widowed/of llamas and Indian”. Gabriela Mistral identified with the Andes. In a poem she evokes the “cold of the nearby peaks” that “wins over her heart.” In another titled “Andean Night” the stars and clear mountain night sky speak to her as “mother night”, for up on Cerro Tololo she feels closer to the cosmic mysteries. But, she wrote, we have forgotten the language stars speak, just guessing what their “burning pulsations” and “passionate demands” mean. In a poem about silence in Patagonia we grasp her pagan view of the gods in the form of “stars staring at her.” Her home in the Elqui valley is “surrounded/by one hundred mountains” that “burn in red and saffron” in their dryness. Aridity and mountain transparency mirror her identity.

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Perito Moreno glacier

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“Deathly Quiet”: Gordon Meyer and San Martín de los Andes The expatriate English writer Gordon Meyer (1919-68) has slipped into oblivion, and little wonder, for he wrote his novels, novellas, short stories and travel books about South America for sophisticated readers without translating or explaining. “The House of Dolls” opens his book Death in the Campo (1963), the story of a trip a jaded university lecturer makes to San Martín de los Andes, simply called the “pueblito”, some time in the 1950s to recuperate from a nervous breakdown. San Martín has since become a ski resort (Cerro Chapelco) on the Lago Lácar shore, where the lake drains into a stream that runs through the town. Its population is around 10,000. The lecturer stays in a place called Hinchén Ruca, run by a German-Irishman, his wife and daughter, and slowly discovers the guilty secrets of the autistic Wagner and his mute family. What strikes me in Meyer’s novella is how landscape and people interact. The mountains surrounding the community are not simply geological and volcanic, but are presences that determine psychic behaviour and in particular mudez or muteness. The story follows the narrator in a rickety bus along a hundred-mile mountain road; on the first page he has an argument with the bus driver. The latent violence is caused by his inability to read the driver’s actions and his intentions: “I could no longer see his face; then slowly he got up, turned, came towards me. As he came down the gangway, eyes ink-black, look unfathomable, I thought: Will he pull a knife? (For there the knife settles most things…).” The bus driver is a Mapuche and the narrator comments on this confrontation: “I had glimpsed something the Spaniards, with gunpowder and horse, their best generals, had been unable to dominate during two centuries.” The untamed, threatening human presence, beyond the rationalities of “daily metropolitan experience”, as the narrator explains to himself, is mirrored by the menacing mountains. As the narrator opens the curtains of his hut, he immediately sees beyond geology: “I studied the mountains across the lake. One of them resembled a mountain-sized monster. Its vast humped back, scaly with rocks and spurs, dominated the lakehead. Its high shoulder swooped down to a thick powerful neck, thence up to a bulgy, flattened head lying half in the water; it night have been drinking…” He speculates as to why the mountains seem somehow evil: “it’s because they’re so pure, so—how can I put it to you?—uncorrupted by 203

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legend, by mythology. One knows that nothing human has ever happened here strong enough to leave its impress on the landscape. Not like Greece, for example.” The blank landscape thus suggests a primal force that predates Ancient Greece and uncontrolled by western reason and science. The tale then becomes a psychic journey into silence as the narrator decides to ride off alone into the hills and woods, and becomes lost on the Cerro Quemado. What strikes him most is the silence, “like entering a cathedral on a hot day”, and the “deathly quiet” starts to crowd in on him, press and crush “until it threatened to become unendurable.” Suddenly a wild bee drones past and the narrator’s eardrums “ached with relief.” Feeling “how little impression man had made in that part of the world,” Meyer senses some horror about its unspeakable origins and realizes how precarious human culture and reason are. By the end of this passage, after sinking into a bog, the narrator can say that “I felt the rhythm of the cordillera enter me.” This imagined alien or inanimate nature bears the hallmark of D. H. Lawrence, who in his story St. Mawr (1925) evokes the mountains of New Mexico as a “landscape [that] lived, and lived as the world of the gods, unsullied and unconcerned… sumptuous and uncaring. Man did not exist for it.” This landscape is outside and beyond European notions of culture and beauty as well as founded in some foul “primal scene”, by “something [that] happened long ago”, some “unnameable hysteria”. In Meyer’s story the inner horror takes the form of hinted-at incest and consequent dumb guilt and derangement. The mountains have trapped people with their “monstrosities”. Both a Mapuche family the narrator encounters and the Wagners live outside society, incestuously. The characters are always on the point of saying something, but do not. In the silence of the wood the narrator collides with “something cosmic; infinitely violent” and loses his power of description in a kind of blind animalism, the silence of pure panic. It is here that he comes across a tomb, decoding an inscription in the Ogham alphabet from the pre-Celtic Táin Bó Cualnge, into a famous line: “Quem Jupiter vult perdere dementat prius” (Whom Jupiter wishes to destroy, he first makes mad). The story ends with the narrator moving on by bus, refusing to condemn what he has seen, following what in “those republics [is] an unwritten, much quoted rule: No te metas en nada” (Don’t get involved). The title “The House of Dolls” literally reverses that of Ibsen’s 1879 204

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play, A Doll’s House, set in the mountains of Norway. At the end of Ibsen’s work Nora breaks out of an asphyxiating marriage with her “I don’t believe in miracles any longer.” Here, conversely, the Wagner family remain trapped in remorse and silence, like the mountains surrounding them. Meyer’s imagined journey is thus a double one: into the Patagonian mountains of San Martín de los Andes and into the guilty secrets of the Wagners. The story traces the slow realization that they live “in that other world”.

Mount Fitzroy and Cerro Torre As Perito Moreno journeyed round the Andes, naming lakes and mountains in patriotic fashion, he never actually discovered the glacier that is now known as the Perito Moreno, although he heard the thunderous cracks and pistol shot noises it makes. Most guidebooks rightly call it one of the wonders of the world, describing its extraordinary turquoise ice and collapsing ice blocks that float off into the lake. Likewise, Moreno never saw Mount Fitzroy in its entirety, as it was constantly hidden by clouds, and he mistakenly assumed it was a volcano. Mario Vargas Llosa found that this dramatic peak, standing at 10,153 feet, was the epitome of the Andes, beautiful and inaccessible. Its granite bones high in the sky make humans seem insignificant and suggest how hard it still must be to live in the Andes. Moreno had located another large, freezing lake and named it the San Martín, after the liberator, then trekked beside Lake Viedma. Dominating the lakes was Mount Fitzroy, which the Indians called “Chaltén”, meaning the refuge of fire or volcano, and thus sacred to them. He decided, however, to change its name, and as the name Chaltén was given to several peaks, he named it after the captain of the Beagle, a Bible-believing aristocrat with whom Darwin argued at table over five long years, and with whom he jointly published the first edition of the voyage, a man who suffered black moods of depression and finally slit his throat with a razor. But he was one of Moreno’s heroes, and meticulously mapped the dangerous Argentine coast. Mount Fitzroy was first climbed in 1952 by a Frenchman, Lionel Terray, and a young Italian, Guido Magnone. El Chaltén, the erstwhile Indian name, was later transferred to the main local tourist centre, founded in 1985. While he skirted Lake Viedma, hunger gnawed at Moreno—“Andean air stirred up appetite”—and his horses tired. He had refused to kill and 205

Cerro Torre: “a scream of stone”

Poets, Patriots and Prisoners

eat a horse when, suddenly, the small group, led by an Indian named Chesko, came across a wounded ostrich and ate it grilled on the lake’s shore. The cold mist made the view of the huge lake, first seen by Antonio de Viedma in 1782, extremely desolate. It was here, too, that the puma attacked, scratching Moreno’s face and back, and after it was killed they felt that it was too skinny to eat and stank. Nearby stands the aptly named Aguja Saint-Exupéry (aguja means needle), with two further mountains named after his aviator friends: Guillaumet and Mermoz. José Luis Fonrouge was killed in a plane crash in 2001 on his way to honour Perito Moreno at Punta Bandera (where Moreno had first raised the sky-blue and white Argentine flag). In the doomed Cessna Caravan were also the editor of the La Nación newspaper Germán Sopeña, the writer Adrián Giménez Hutton (he had traced Bruce Chatwin’s footsteps in a book) and Fonrouge’s wife and daughter. The crash happened a fortnight after we had seen Sopeña deliver a lecture at London’s Royal Geographic Society on Perito Moreno. Fonrouge’s posthumous memoirs reveal the inner life of the mountaineer. As a thirteen-year-old he became hooked on free climbing, training at a disused factory near Escobar, Buenos Aires. By sixteen, he was off alone with a rucksack attempting to scale the Nevado de Chañi, Jujuy’s highest mountain at 20,458 feet. There he learned to acclimatize himself, to be wary of crumbling rocks caused by extreme differences in temperature between day and night, and to respect winds. He had failed to climb to the summit, but being alone meant that a mountain had become his “master”. All his life spent climbing, he wrote, had been mere preparation for climbing Mount Fitzroy, his ideal aesthetic and sporting mountain. Just to reach the base of this mountain in 1963 was an ordeal of paperwork and logistics, using empty coal wagons from Río Turbio to transport supplies. The ascent was strange, like a symphony where he and his partner worked in harmony, but it is clear that Fonrouge climbed intuitively. He could predict the weather, as storms were sudden and violent, and which way to climb, which fork to follow as there were no routes. He yearned to enter that “state of grace” that came with full concentration and danger, hanging over a “giddy emptiness”. The north face of Fitzroy, with its granite walls covered in frozen dew, triggered off an “ecstasy or trance that no words could convey”, a mystical fit. Huge Lake Viedma lay below, and moun207

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tains like San Lorenzo and Lautaro rose around him, the universe appearing in a new light, as if in a dream of an unfinished masterpiece. He understood what separated Fitzroy from anything in the Alps: the desolation, the howling wind called the locomotora, the absence of people, other climbers, helicopters, mountain retreats, all the paraphernalia of organized European mountaineering. Finally on the summit, he slipped his blue and white ribbon (like Moreno’s flag) under a stone in the pirca, the cairn that everybody piles up to mountain-top gods around the world. Nearby also is the formidable Cerro Torre, its granite needle thought to be unclimbable due to winds of 160 mph and sheer sides of crystalline igneous diorite. The first claim of a successful attempt came in 1959 from an Italian, Cesari Maestri, but he had no proof as his companion, the Austrian Toni Egger, fell to his death with his camera (his body was only recovered in 1975). On a second attempt in 1970 Maestri again claimed to have scaled Cerro Torre, having brought a drill with him to climb more quickly. Maestri was a hero in Italy, and Werner Herzog made a film about his controversial climb called Scream of Stone (1991), dramatizing the competition between traditional climbers and the new breed of mountaineers. The narrator/actor Donald Sutherland calls the Cerro Paine the greatest challenge on earth, a peak that humiliates those who attempt to master it, while another climber, without fingers, who turns out to be the first to have scaled it, calls it “not a mountain, it’s a scream of stone”. One last peak, the 9,266-foot Cerro Murallón, standing within the 270-mile range known as the Hielos Patagónicos, was not scaled until 1983 by another Italian, Casimiro Ferrari. He had nicknamed it the “bewitched” mountain and had twice failed before due to atrocious weather. Ferrari so fell in love with this area of Patagonia that he divorced his wife, sold up his Italian business and emigrated. From the sale of an apartment in Milan he bought a 6,500-acre farm.

Neruda’s Andean Crossing Pablo Neruda, no mountaineer though we have seen that he climbed up to Macchu Picchu, had finally joined the Chilean Communist Party in 1945. He had also begun writing his people’s verse history of Latin America, the Canto general, eventually published in Mexico in 1951. In 1946 he supported the presidential campaign of Gabriel González Videla, who soon turned against the Chilean communists. Later, in the Senate, 208

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Neruda delivered, in Adam Feinstein’s words, “one of the bravest, most astonishing speeches in Chilean political history”, now known, like Zola’s diatribe, as “I accuse”. He immediately became a wanted man, with a reward on his head, so went underground for a year in Chile, disguised with a beard and living a clandestine life in safe houses. In his long poem he labelled González Videla a “rat”, a “traitor”, a “Judas”. After a while Neruda decided to cross the Andes into Argentina incognito. His crossing, recalled in his memoirs Confieso que he vivido (1974) began with the apprehensive remark: “and you don’t play with the Andes.” He and four others rode on horses along vague smugglers’ routes (the Mapuche Indians knew all the passes), fording icy rivers like the Curringue, their horses swimming. Neruda was scared of being washed away, especially as he was carrying the disguised manuscript of the Canto general—he referred to this incident in his Nobel Prize speech. He had not ridden since his teens (he was then forty-five) and the leader of the group mocked him as a “bearded sack of potatoes in his saddle”. They hacked their way along mountain gorges to the Lilpela pass. As he crossed the frontier, Neruda wrote on an abandoned hut: “hasta luego, my fatherland. I’m off but I take you with me.” He finally rode into San Martín de los Andes, in Argentina, under the alias of a travelling entomologist, and was nicknamed the “mountain man” in his luxury hotel.

Tupungato: Keenan and McCarthy Brian Keenan and John McCarthy, held hostage for five years in Lebanon, had often dreamed of visiting the Andes as a way of escaping their cell through imaginary travel. Five years later, they flew to Chile, took notes and wrote a joint book, in alternate sections, like a dialogue between them. Keenan is a poet and chose Neruda as his spiritual guide, constantly citing his “poetic map of Chile”. They went south of Santiago, after visiting Neruda’s three houses, to the Colorado river. There they hired horses and a guide and rode up valleys of “bare red rock” (“colorado” means reddish) into the Andes, identifying with the outlaw Neruda and his Andean crossing. Scared of falling off their horses and giddy, they reached 12,400 feet up over the Mal Paso, and spotted Tupungato, an extinct volcano that dominates the mountainscape. McCarthy was reminded of Mervyn Peake’s fantasy novel Gormenghast, which he had read in captivity as he felt “in another dimension”. (Its is odd how fiction is often the best guide to the 209

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real, even in the days of the conquistadors who saw the sixteenth-century chivalric novel Amadis de Gaul come alive in Mexico.) McCarthy noticed a glacier above them across the valleys and was told by their guide that those “little pinnacles of ice” called “penitents”—like repentant sinner on their knees—were unique to the Andes. He wrote: “it is a very odd sight, like something from a sci-fi film set… Dotted over an area about a hundred yards square are little pyramids of snow, the biggest about six feet high. The ground between them is totally dry and rocky like everywhere else.” His former cell-companion compared them to old-fashioned male urinals (but he was having a bad time on horseback); Fonrouge called them ice stalagmites. They passed a tall iron post that pinpointed the border between Chile and Argentina, established by Perito Moreno, hunted around a fossil field and spied the still-steaming Tupungatito volcano (the smaller but active neighbour of Tupango) in the distance.

Cordillera Sarmiento/Mount Sarmiento In 1992 Jack Miller reported in the National Geographic magazine how his mountaineering party had scaled an icy peak that rose 6,550 feet on the tip of the southern Andes in Chile. Usually in cloud cover and lashed by ocean winds, it had no name, so they called it Gremlin’s Cap. It is just one of many dramatic summits in the Cordillera Sarmiento, a range named after Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa (1532-92) who drew maps of this part of the Pacific coast in 1579. He was an expert navigator and was named Captain General of the Magellan Straits. His second trip out in 1581 was a disaster, and over 150 sailors died at sea before he founded a settlement with 300 men called Nombre de Jesús. He founded a second town, but was blown off course up to Brazil, and back to Spain in 1590. Nearly everyone starved to death in his ill-fated colony. On a rare calm day Jack Miller’s group climbed through the cloud cover and reached the top: “we howled, we danced, we hugged. First ascents are a climber’s dream.” From there they could see snow peaks eighty miles away. Before them Charles Darwin had seen Mount Sarmiento in the distance through clouds, a “very noble spectacle”. The mountain named after Sarmiento (“Cerro” means both mountain and range) is one of the highest on Tierra del Fuego. The Beagle anchored at the base of this mountain of perpendicular sides, and Darwin saw just one 210

The Beagle anchored close to Mount Sarmiento, Tierra del Fuego, illustration by R. T. Pritchett

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deserted wigwam. The sight of the hostile landscape provoked one of his famous insights about nature: “The inanimate works of nature—rock, ice, snow, wind and water—all warring with each other, yet combined against man—here reigned in absolute sovereignty.”

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Chapter Fourteen

Colombia In Search of El Dorado Colombia, named after Columbus, is another Andean country, but here the majority of its population live in valleys under the mountains. From Ecuador the Andes splits northwards into three ranges, with the Cordillera Central separating the Cauca river valley from the Cordillera Occidental, which runs along the Pacific coast. On the other side of the Cordillera Central lies the Magdalena river valley with the Cordillera Oriental to its east, a range that includes Bogotá and then splits into two further ranges, one towards Santa Marta and the other to Caracas. The Cauca river is a tributary of the Magdalena. Including cool, upland Bogotá, Colombia has developed an essentially urban culture, based on several provincial cities such as Cali, a sugar cane centre on the Cauca with a pass through the westerly range to the coast, and Medellín, at some 4,000 feet the heartland of cocaine, Catholicism and coffee. In fact, the Colombian Andes remain for most cold and distant peaks looking down on the rich cultural life in the country’s deep, warm valleys. Life in the coastal “tierra caliente” or hot land (García Márquez’s imaginary but authentic Macondo) is far removed from the Andean “tierras templadas” (temperate) and “tierras frías” (cold land), which might be warm in the sunlight but very cool at night. Here is another Andean constant: the huge difference between sunlight and shade, sometimes as wide as 30°F. The difference between arid and freezing peak and sweltering tropical valley can be “staggering”, as Simon Lamb observed. When Aimé Félix Tschiffely rode north from Ecuador into Colombia on his way to Bogotá, he reached the Galeras volcano, which towers over the town of Pasto, founded in 1539 and for years the stronghold of loyalist Spanish forces. Though nearly on the equator, its altitude—8,491 feet—makes it a cool city. He climbed the volcano, only five miles from the city, twice and vividly described its enormous and terrifying eruptions. 213

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Once on the top, he saw a second, smaller crater with fumes hissing and snorting, making a din like a “gigantic steam train”. He was with a geologist, so they tried to climb down inside over the hot rocks, daring to reach a place where fumes “seethed” out of vents. Then there was a tremor and he was covered in a cloud of sulphur fumes and almost choked until a gust of cold wind blew it away, “and I lost no time in scrambling out of this hell.” He was lucky. In January 1993 a team of scientists died on this volcano, including a geologist from the Open University.

Popayán Arriving by horse out of the Patia valley, Tschiffely next reached Popayán, which at 5,772 feet is still a cool refuge from the hot and fertile Cauca valley. Snow-topped, conical volcanic mountains like Puracé (12,988 feet) and Sotará (15,875 feet) surround the town. Puracé erupted in 1849 and mudflows devastated the area. It erupted again in 1869, its snow melting with mudslides so that the rivers burst their banks and a rain of ash fell. Robert Blake White witnessed its three-mile-high plume of steam and ash. Popayán’s mayor pleaded for him to inspect the crater as the sole scientist in the area. He waded through warm rivers and walked across foulsmelling mud until in the village of Puracé he heard the volcano exploding every twenty seconds. Stones so hot fell around his campsite that he could light his cigarette with one. When the wind stopped howling, the stink of sulphur contaminated his food. As he walked to the rim, his boots started burning, but finally he peeped inside at the flames. Popayán, named after an Indian chief, was founded by one of Pizarro’s lieutenants, Sebastián Belalcázar, in 1536 at the foot of the Cerro de la Eme and is capital of the Cauca department. Tschiffely deemed it “one of the quaintest little towns in all Colombia”, reflected in its good taste and old colonial houses. (It was laid low by an earthquake in 1983.) Nearby, he wrote, is the Río Vinagre (Vinegar), so called for its sulphurous taste, due to a nearby volcano (it was too poisonous for any fish). Tschiffely never refers to other travellers, but Humboldt had passed that way on foot in 1801. Humboldt found the climate of Popayán “delicious” and spent a month in the village of Puracé under the volcano and perched on the brink of a precipice, the site of Río Vinagre’s warm-water waterfall, which he famously sketched cascading four hundred feet down. Here he met Francisco 215

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José de Caldas (1771-1816), who discovered how altitude could be gauged by variations in the boiling point of water, and who, like Humboldt and Bonpland, was a fervent supporter of independence (and was shot by the Spanish). Humboldt boasted in a letter of 1802 that Popayán was as advanced as anywhere in the world, with scientists like Caldas observing Jupiter’s moons. The cathedral bell, he said, could be heard everywhere, cast out of fifty pounds of silver. Negley Farson (1890-1960), a journalist who interviewed Gandhi, met Hitler and drank and fished with Hemingway, hired a car and drove 800 miles across the Andes. He stopped in Popayán to interview the great Colombian poet William (actually Guillermo) Valencia. Farson spoke no Spanish, but nevertheless focused in his travel account on politics. Valencia was also a conservative anti-communist who twice ran for president in 1918 and 1930 and failed. Everywhere he went people asked him to declaim his poems. In his study in a rambling old ranch-house among eucalyptus trees, Farson noted a signed photo of D’Annunzio, the last letter Bolívar wrote on his deathbed and a glass statuette of Gandhi. Under the jagged blue silhouette of the Andes, Valencia complained that at least three men in Popayán were receiving money from Russia. Farson saw Valencia as fitting perfectly in the town, a stronghold of the Church where from his hotel he heard drumbeats and students marching to mass. Valencia seemed out of touch with reality, he thought, for although he had once chatted with Nietzsche, he hated progress and hopelessly wondered why there were no strongmen in Colombia to halt the liberals. Valencia died in Popayán in 1943, aged seventy. He had made his continental name with his sole book of poems Ritos (1899), with an opening elegy to the Colombian poet José Asunción Silva, who had drawn a circle around his heart and shot himself. Valencia read this poem at Silva’s grave in the special cemetery for suicides. He translated Goethe, Chinese poetry and, after meeting Oscar Wilde in Paris, the “Ballad of Reading Gaol”. He also promoted the legend that Don Quijote was buried in Popayán. For many years he was “the voice of Colombia” and in 1941 was easily voted the country’s most popular poet. Christopher Isherwood, after recovering from a bout of diarrhoea, also visited Valencia’s home. He was taken by the critic Baldomero Sanín Cano, who was deferentially addressed by everyone as “maestro” and dressed like an English squire with bull-dog features and walking stick. 216

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Valencia’s house was by now stuffy and dehumanized. Popayán was by far the nicest place Isherwood had seen in Colmbia, with wide, clean streets, and as many horses as cars. What a stark contrast with Isaac Holton (1812-74), who thought of visiting Popayán in 1852 during his twenty-month stay in the Andes, but avoided the town as “the paradise of fleas”. Holton seemingly knew about fleas and inspected them under his microscope, noting that in proportion to its size, a flea leaps the equivalent of 800 feet for a human being.

Medellín and Cali The city of Medellín, founded in 1616 and named after a Spanish count, is hemmed in by the Andes and lies at around 5,000 feet, though its climate is benign. It remained isolated until the textile industry and coffeegrowing dominated in the nineteenth century and has since undergone dramatic changes. The self-exiled writer Fernando Vallejo has captured these in what I call his “hysterical” novel La virgen de los sicarios (Our Lady of the Assassins, 2001), a narrative rant (in the mode of Austrian Thomas Bernhard) against modern Medellín. The novel was turned into a film by Barbet Schroeder, and the actor who played the character of the assassin was himself later killed. Vallejo has also written a dense study of the last days preceding the suicide of the poet José Asunción Silva, a work on Charles Darwin and several further novels. His diatribe against everyday modern Colombian life takes the form of a gay man returning to his hometown after thirty years, and explaining the city’s changes to a foreigner. The narrator finds Medellín “unreal”, a nightmare world of crack (basuco) smokers controlled by the narcotraficantes. In the murder capital of Colombia he looks at how people kill for a song, and how once machete-waving peasants who throng the hillside shanties now wield Uzis. It is also a city of unendurable noise: where people have to live with ear plugs, where a taxi driver playing loud vallenatos is shot in the head, and a neighbouring punkero who keeps the gay lovers awake is gunned down in the street. The cacophony of loud music, TVs, radios and other forms of din comes from the slums. This “cursed” city has some 150 churches (the narrator boasts that he has counted them), but once a Catholic enclave, now uses them as locales for drug deals and pickups. Bullets, he claims, are blessed with holy water. The book identifies two cities: the ageless one in the valley, which 217

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looks up at the other, the slums, or comunas, on the mountains surrounding it. Those below never go up, but those above come down to rob, mug and murder. Up in the slums, he writes, war between different zones is continuous, while a million and a half people live there, breeding like rats. At night, the narrator looks up at them, their “lights throbbing on the mountain”. The once-awesome Andes are now the place from where “evil” descends (not the centaurs of the Colombian national anthem). Vallejo offers no explanations, blaming the Spanish for leaving behind a “cheating, lazy, envious, lying, sickening, betraying, thieving, killing and pyromaniac gentuza [rabble]”. The contrast with how Kathleen Romoli, fifty years previously, evoked Medellín, Colombia’s second city, could not be more striking. She singled out as the city’s symbol the carrielones, the poor hillside farmer with a leather bag or carriel, who travelled down to town for market, worked hard, hardly spoke and kept his dignity. Romoli thought that Medellín was one of those rare places where one would like to live, referring to sunsets over the mountains and the song of canaries, even if admitted that thieves thrived, relating how they even stole the wheels from a police car, their cheek admired by all. The best chronicle of decline in civic life in Medellín is by the locally born journalist Héctor Abad Faciolince. His memoir El olvido que seremos (2006) is a moving elegy to his thinking, socialist father, assassinated in the street in 1987. He writes in long, sensuous sentences (his avowed debt to Proust), and as well as being a Bildungsroman, the book meditates on how Medellín evolved from the quiet, privileged, Catholic provincial capital of Antioquía into a city torn apart by the state’s anti-communist violence and narco-trafficking assassins in a country “of daily catastrophes”. Héctor Abad embodies the ideological split in Colombia. His mother was the daughter of Medellín’s archbishop. He was sent to a private, conservative, sex-phobic Opus Dei school, frequented by the white rich. His father was a doctor who worked for free in the slums, fighting for clean water and milk, and who when forced to retire, wrote and worked for human rights until he appeared on a death list and was shot dead by thugs on a motorbike. The family owned a third-generation farm, reached only on horseback. Abad worked on his memoir there, in the hidden countryside away from the dreadful urban violence. “It’s one of the earth’s privileged sites,” he wrote. “In the distance you can see the Cartama river… 218

Medellín shanty town

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above, the peaks of La Oculta and Jericó.” From a landscape filled with trees planted by his family, green parrots, blue butterflies, barking dogs and the stink of dung, he saw opposite him the “imposing peaks (farallones) of La Pintada that my dad taught me to see as the breasts of a naked woman lying down.” This is the Andean Cordillera Central, once known as “Las mamas (breasts) de Caramata” and today as Los Farallones, with the highest point, La Paz, at 4,353 feet. The range of peaks above the fertile, tropical valleys can act as a wall, protecting those who live there, like a paradise or utopia. The farm that Jorge Isaacs (1837-95) came from in the Cauca valley, near Cali, was suitably called “El Paraíso” (and still exists), situated half way up a mountain, and was similar to Abad’s family farm since it was within urban life that evil and politics lurked. Isaacs belonged to a once Jewish English family from Jamaica, wrote a lachrymose novel María (1867) and after much fighting in civil wars and exploring his own country, especially the Guajira peninsula, died in poverty. María became the best-selling of all Latin American novels until Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad one hundred years later in 1967. The sad love story it tells reached every corner of Latin America. The Colombian essayist Germán Arciniegas once came across a rundown bar in a forgotten pampa village in Argentina with the name “El Valle del Cauca”, inspired by the novel. Arciniegas made the point that what really moved its readers was not the tale of doomed love, but the way Isaacs evoked the Andean landscape in a way that left his narrator mute and impotent in the face of such beauty. The novel describes family life, hunting, horses, a sugar cane factory and black slaves (with a long story about their migration from Africa) with meticulous details. If anything, María, Catholic and chaste (but in fact a Jewish convert), is the incarnation of the Andean valleys. When Efraín the narrator has been two weeks in London, he receives a letter from María and its folds smell of her roses. He exclaims: “American mountains, my mountains!” as the image of the Andes replaces immense, noisy and foggy London. Called home from London after seventeen months studying medicine because of her illness, he stares at the mountains from on board his ship at Buenaventura on the Pacific coast of Colombia and recalls their “silence and loneliness”. Cali and home is a five-day trip up the River Dagua in a canoe and then a crossing over the Andes through a pass into the Cauca valley (today it takes four hours along a ninety-mile toll road). 220

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Isaacs was an amateur naturalist, and his novel enumerates the poisonous snakes (where one fatal bite has the victim bleeding to death through all his pores), the swarms of mosquitoes and the bitter herbal remedies. Crossing the mountains, his hero sees steep-faced Víbora (where Isaacs wrote the novel in isolation between 1864 and 1866) and the harsh Medialuna range which shades the deep gorges on his way home to a dying María. His family await him in Cali, but he arrives too late, the journey is too slow. It was a journey that Isaacs himself knew well, for as road inspector he travelled from the Cauca valley to the Pacific Ocean over the cordillera. By the time Paul Theroux took a train down the Cauca valley, past banana and coffee fields, grazing cows and skinny peasants on his way to Patagonia (which nobody had heard of ), he had become depressed by the heat and boredom. Cali he found so dull that he spent an afternoon flossing his teeth. After a desultory walk in the surrounding countryside defying stone-throwing peasants and mutts, he ate in a fancy restaurant where he overheard enormous, pot-bellied American missionaries talk about Costa Rica and the Mosquito Coast; his best novel, The Mosquito Coast, germinated in his imagination. Santiago de Cali, where Isaacs was born, was founded in its present site by Belalcázar in 1537. The Cali river runs through it towards the Cauca river in what is known as El Valle, once navigable to the Magdalena river. It is surrounded by mountains (los Farallones de Cali) whose sides are lush and cultivated. The city is 3,482 feet above sea level, tropical, with cool mountain breezes at night and palm-tree avenues. For most of the colonial period it remained isolated until the railway joined it to the Pacific port of Buenaventura in the early 1900s and transformed the city into today’s industrial, narcotics (the Cali cartel was notorious) and guerrilla centre. It has 2.3 million inhabitants and rivals Bogotá and Medellín in economic importance.

The Andes Imagined (11): Eduardo Caballero Calderón’s EL CRISTO DE ESPALDAS Eduardo Caballero Calderón (1910-93) was a wiry, bearded journalist and diplomat who represented Colombia in UNESCO. He became the first mayor of his hometown, Tipacoque, in the Cordillera Oriental. He also wrote a short novel about life in a deep valley of the Colombian Andes, deliberately withholding its geographic name. Despite some narrative intru221

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sions, the author lets the local mestizo peasants and thugs speak for themselves in this dialogue-based novel. A young, idealist priest of 25 arrives from his seminary in Bogotá to experience life in a sealed-off Andean valley. The novel opens with the priest on his donkey staring down from a mountain pass under El Alto de la Cruz, wrapped in his ruana or poncho against freezing wind and pelting rain. Hanging on to a cliff side he notices a patch of local Andean flowers called frailejones. The church steeple down below also looks like this plant, first described by Humboldt and named “Espeletia” after the Viceroy Ezpeleta, a “curious-looking” succulent, with yellow, daisy-like flowers, native to the Andes. Described by the priest as “hairy and grey like a donkey’s ear”, the tough flower is almost fire-resistant and re-appears in the novel to become a symbol of Andean resilience. Like many urbanites, the priest fondly imagines that the inhabitants of this rural backwater will be simple and innocent creatures. Instead, he is defeated by their deviance and learns that human nature has turned its back on Christ—hence the novel’s title El Cristo de espaldas (Christ from the Back, 1952). Caballero Calderón published this novel with the great publishing house of Losada in Buenos Aires, and it quickly sold out its first three editions. He showed in dramatic terms to the rest of Latin America how the terrible “Violencia”, Colombia’s civil war that followed the assassination of Jorge Eliécir Gaitán in 1948, could be grasped. The priest on his donkey stumbles down the steep spiralling path to the village, feeling giddy as the wind bites his face. He soon falls into petty provincial life where everybody knows everybody and where gossip and alcohol rule. So little happens that whatever does inflames “morbid curiosity”. The novel follows his first days there, as a local farm owner’s son seeks refuge after his father, the local conservative boss, is found murdered and all points to his being the assassin. The murder is deemed a political one, and all liberals or “reds” are hunted down or sent into exile in the next village over the mountain pass. The priest cannot deal with the many revelations, especially when in confession he learns that the dying sacristan was the real killer and had been paid. The crime is solved, but the priest cannot betray the confession. After five days in this pagan hell where Christian, civilized values are meaningless and revenge rules, the priest is recalled to his seminary in Bogotá. He leads a peasant woman whose husband has been murdered and her children with him up “that inter222

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minable slope”. The priest has a sudden insight, like a flash of lightning in the mountains: He was struck by a strange impression caused by the contrast that the imposing sea of peaks and mountains presented, violently illuminated by the sun that fell straight down on the deepest slopes and that were crowned up above by the grey, dirty rags of formless thunder clouds. The dark, the cold, the sadness, the loneliness vegetated up above, next to the hard grass and the melancholic frailejones.

Quindío Still following in the tracks of Tschiffely, we reach Bogotá, but the route was unsuitable for his two horses. He hired a mule and arrived at Armenia in the Cauca valley. On the way, a snake attacked him, but he was saved by his riding boots. Armenia lies at the foot of the Nevado del Quindío at just over 6,000 feet in the coffee growing district, where he admired the bushes’ “wonderfully green” leaves. It is a new town, founded in 1889, with a university. The Quindío pass that Tschiffely climbed with his mule is now a paved road, its high point standing at 10,988 feet, and in his time was called “la línea”, affording a fine view of the valley and mountains around. At Ibague Tschiffely stabled his mule and took a train towards the Magdalena river. On the way back over the same pass in heavy rain, as he passed a family, a girl’s mule stumbled, but she hung on like an expert and gave him a “merry” smile. He added: “There are smiles we never forget.” Humboldt and Bonpland walked over this same pass in 1801 with twelve oxen carrying their equipment and collections under a continuous deluge of rain. At that time it was not marked on the maps, there were no rest huts and travellers took up to twelve days to cross and could be trapped by sudden torrents after tropical downpours. Humboldt stressed how narrow the path was and how rain had hollowed out gullies, so dark “the traveller is forced to grope his passage.” Humboldt refused to be carried on a mestizo porter’s back (“andar en carguero” was the custom), but thorns so ripped his shoes that he had to go barefoot in the thick, muddy clay and icy streams. Humboldt protested that these carriers of human loads had one of the most painful jobs in the world, but there were many takers— he once passed past a file of sixty porters carrying white mining officials. In 1974 Paul Theroux compared the Quindio pass with the Grand 223

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Canyon but covered with greenery. He was amazed that hairpin roads crossed the impassable rapids and vertical gorges. It took six hours to drive the sixty-five miles. Up to the pass Theroux had preferred reading Boswell’s Johnson (and quoting from it) to watching the scenery, “but at the Quindio Pass I put the book aside… I had seen nothing to compare this with.” The deep canyons, cliffs, tortuous roads and houses clinging to the cliff sides amazed him and explained Bogotá’s Andean remoteness. One hair-raising aspect of the Andes is the way in which roads and motorways have been carved into steep mountainsides, for bus and lorry drivers are inveterate risk-takers and fatal accidents part of everyday life. (There is even a verb, “desbarrancarse”, to crash into a deep ravine.) Juan Gabriel Vásquez, one of Colombia’s exciting young writers, set his novel Los informantes (The Informers, 2004), in a world of terrifying roads and mishaps. A car journey from Bogotá to Medellín involves some eight hours of motorway that begins with the ear-popping descent from the Andes on one of Colombia’s most “inhospitable roads”, as leaving Bogotá “means, among other feats, jumping over a mountain range.” While speeding down, the journalist son of the “informer” recalls the Colombian national anthem “Bolívar Crosses the Andes”. The 5th stanza has the liberator crossing the Andes that “water two oceans” as “untameable centaurs/descend to the plains.” After meeting the man who had had his father’s fingers sliced off by thugs with machetes, the journalist drives back up out of Medellín and its reeking tropics to see where his father’s car crashed into the ravine. Again his ears hurt with pressure as they do every time he drives up to Bogotá.

Bogotá The high plain on which today’s Bogotá stands at some 7,500 feet once belonged to the Chibchas and was called Cundinamarca, the “land of the condors”. When the Spanish arrived avid for gold, they found only potatoes. One soldier described his first taste: “farinaceous roots of pleasant flavour, much prized by the Indians and a delicacy even to the Spaniards.” They found salt, which was used in exchange for gold, but no gold mines. The Chibcha chief or zipa was called Bogotá and his capital, on the same spot as today’s, was called Muequetá. The Chibchas were rivals with another tribe and were probably migrants from Peru as they spoke a language similar to Quechua. 224

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It was up on the plain of Cundinamarca that rumours of a fabled El Dorado were kindled. He was the legendary “gilded man” and the sacred Lake Guatavita (of which more later) was identified as the possible treasure trove. Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada reached Zipaquirá, a salt mine inside a hill, in 1537. He quickly took over the highland culture, “without a scratch”, and called it New Granada, after his home town in Spain. By an odd coincidence, three conquistadors met on these high plains in 1537. The first was Belalcázar, Pizarro’s man from Quito, which he had conquered in 1534, and probably responsible for coining the term El Dorado. The second was the German Nikolaus Federmann (1505-42) who crossed the Andes from the east in 1539 through passes at over 13,000 feet. The third was Quesada, a lawyer from Granada, who claimed control of the region for the crown. This chance meeting of three conquistadors and their armies seeking gold confirms how unknown these new mapless lands were, so that three expeditions, without contacting each other, reached the same area at the same time The main route up into the Andes was via the Magdalena river from Santa Marta and Barranquilla The first river ascent took place in 1533 during the expedition of Ambrosius Ehinger (or Einger), a German-appointed governor-general of Tierra Firme, as northern South America was first called. Soon after, Quesada took five brigantines upstream but was attacked by poisoned arrows, hunger and bugs, so that 700 men were reduced to a mere 200 survivors. Such was their hunger that when a man killed his precious horse for meat, Quesada, in Silverberg’s vivid account, executed him. It took them ten months before they could climb up into Andean tierra fría from the river, a distance of some 500 miles. In 1801 Humboldt and Bonpland canoed up the fast-flowing Magdalena to Bogotá (it took them forty-five days). The mission was to meet José Celestino Mutis (1732-1808), a 72-year-old doctor, priest, botanist and correspondent with Linnaeus, who catalogued the local flora and promoted quinine bark. The owner of a huge library of 8,000 volumes and over 20,000 dried plants, he headed the Spanish Royal Botanical Expedition to New Granada, sent over by Charles III in 1760 to stock the newly created Royal Botanical Gardens in Madrid, and had 6,717 beautiful illustrations made, that were then abandoned until 1954 when they were rediscovered and published. In Bogotá, Bonpland fell ill with malaria, so he and Humboldt re225

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mained almost two months in the capital. Their arrival was an event; there had not been such bustle and tumult in this “dead town for years and years”, he confided. Few foreigners ever reached the city. Over his time there Humboldt carried out his usual activities, climbed mountains, explored Lake Guatavita, located salt and fossils and received his first letters from home for two years. The Vermont-born bachelor botanist Isaac Holton followed Quesada’s route and reached Bogotá up the River Magdalena from Santa Marta on the Caribbean coast. He found a city of cobblestone streets without pavements and with many pack mules. No buildings were over two floors high, and all were whitewashed with large portals and courtyards (as in most of Latin America) and had small grated windows “from which the female inhabitants seem to be constantly looking out like prisoners.” These female voyeurs were dull, he said, because as nobody read there was no conversation. Like many visitors, Holton called Bogotá the city of churches. A population that he precisely numbered 29,649 had little short of thirty churches, and he visited twenty-five of them (which nobody else ever had). In 1852 he climbed up and visited the páramo, a place he judged too cold for cultivation. Its most typical plant, he observed, was the frailejón (it is supposed to resemble a fraile or priest), which yielded a “stiff kind of turpentine” and whose leaves kept travellers warm in the freezing nights if they covered themselves in them. From Monserrate, the chapel-crowned peak, he viewed the city and the distant snow peaks of Tolima (18,392 feet) and the Nevado de Ruiz (17,189 feet). Tschiffely, in a reverse journey, had to travel towards the Magdalena river in hot, damp and oppressive conditions. From Giradot, a river port, a train slowly winds up into the cold uplands. In Bogotá he found hotel prices after months in the saddle “ridiculously high” and the streets full of potholes. Again, he noted the number of churches, and the chapel on top of the Monserrate mountain, but he was not a “sightseer” and was happy to leave the “dull and gloomy city”. Bogotá lies high at 8,692 feet, enough to give sudden nose-bleeds. Monserrate now has a funicular railway and cable car, offering a view of the red-roofed city from the top. At its foot lies the Quinta de Bolívar, once the liberator’s home and now a museum. The main plaza is also named after him, and round it the Barrio la Candelaria is the old part of town. Nearby is Manuela Saénz’s mansion. She saved Bolívar’s life in 1828 226

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when he jumped from her bed out of a window and hid. At that time it was still a cut-off city, with a population of only 100,000 in 1900 (it is now around 5.7 million). The grid streets are famously identified by numbers rather than names. When I was there I found the Librería Bucholz, run by a huge young poet Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda, one of the best bookshops in Latin America. Indeed Christopher Isherwood claimed that he had never seen so many bookshops anywhere. Or perhaps the city’s centre is the Museo de Oro (God Museum)? As the lights turn on in what is essentially a huge safe, the glitter of the gold artefacts is unforgettable. In 1946 Isherwood and his photographer boyfriend William Caskey sailed up the Magdalena in a riverboat in ten days (journey times had shrunk from ten months to ten days). Then they took a train up from sea level to over 8,000 feet, from stifling heat to clouds, beating rain and extreme cold. The sudden thin air caused them unease, and Isherwood speculated about “the terror the great mountains stir in you. Man ought not to live up here.” He thought he could discern a mournful mood in the villages seen from the train, faces unsmiling and aloof. The Bogotá plains or sabana, with their rich land and eucalyptus groves, were a “release”; he could have been in the San Fernando Valley in California (where he was self-exiled). Paul Theroux took the Expreso de Sol train from Santa Marta to Bogotá, leaving the Magdalena river and climbing into the cold zone in a “drenching downpour”. He arrived in Bogotá at night. His first impression was of a mournful Spanish city, with a peculiarly Andean gloom. It rained all his stay, and “cold drizzle imprisoned” the city in its “dreary solemnity”. Far worse, the mountains seemed to invade his body in the form of dizziness and palpitations. He mused over the relationship with Spain and the church steeples, seeing the city as aloof from the rest of South America. Watching a rag-collecting Indian woman, he perceptively remarked: “The woman is not walking in a city: she is walking across a mountainside with sure-footed animals. She is in the Andes, she is home; everyone else is in Spain.” Gabriel García Márquez (known as Gabo) penned his early autobiography (up to age of 28) as Vivir para contarla (Living to Tell the Tale, 2003). He recreated his Caribbean childhood with stunning detail as the eldest of eleven children whose mother finally died aged 97, with 75 grandchildren, 88 great-grandchildren and fourteen great-great227

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grandchildren. The River Magdalena was his route up to the Andes and Bogotá. In 1944 he took the riverboat at Magangué and travelled for five days to Puerto Salgar past forgotten villages, crocodiles chasing butterflies, herons, monkeys, parrots and manatees. At Puerto Salgar he had to dress in the Bogotan uniform of dark suit, waistcoat and bowler hat. Up in the “cradle of civilization”, he experienced cold for the first time, and he called Bogotá the “gloomiest city in the world”. He later published his first stories in Bogotá, witnessed the bogotazo of 1948 (as did his later friend Fidel Castro) and a decade of relentless violence before leaving Colombia. For someone from the tropical coast, Andean Bogotá was “another country”.

Tequendama Falls and Lake Guatavita Waterfalls abound among the heights of the Andes. A tourist site near Bogotá that gives some sense of how high the city is perched is the Tequendama Falls, where the River Bogotá cascades for over 500 feet down a rocky, forested gorge. Holton went there by mule, before the age of tourists, and described its immense chasm and its spray like smoke that created a constant rainbow. Humboldt’s friend the naturalist José Caldas thought that the river, used to running along the high Andes, was shocked by its deep fall and wanted to climb back up again in the form of spray. It is three times higher (or deeper as you tend to see it from the top) than the Niagara Falls. The area is rich in exotic plants, and Holton reached for one over the abyss with instinctive caution. (Nowadays one would be more likely to grab a discarded plastic bag than a flower.) Nevertheless, Santos Chocano, always on the look-out for symbols of his Pan America, called the falls the “suicide of a river”, comparing them to a wriggling snake in a condor’s beak. In the Cordillera Occidental, some five hours from Bogotá, on a conical peak without a name lies the circular Lake Guatavita, “like a chalice destined to receive the sun”, in Kathleen Romoli’s words. Lying 7,500 feet up on the Cundinamarca plain this was where “El Dorado” was believed to have purified himself. In 1534, in his Noticias históricas, Fray Simón attributed the cruel El Dorado myth to the conquistador Belalcázar. It told of an adulterous princess, whose husband the Usaque (or tribal leader) had her lover killed and her name shamed by gossip. She could not bear to live without honour so threw herself and her daughter into the lake. The shock of grief made the Usaque try to win her back, but a priest told 228

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him she was happy in her underwater palaces, so he began the ritual of casting gold and precious stones into the lake. First he fasted and abstained from sex, then, naked, was coated in turpentine so that gold dust would stick to him before washing it off in the lake’s waters. Later, all the local Chibchas threw their gold into the lake as the Spaniards starting looting their villages. Since then at least three adventurers, according to Romoli, have tried in vain to extract gold out from the lake, which has been drained and tunnelled into. Since a British mining company obtained just £2,000 of gold in 1914 from £32,000 invested, only to find that the thirty-foot deep mud at the lake’s bottom dried rock hard when the water was drained, the lake has refilled and remained abandoned. The fabulous riches were never to be dragged up and El Dorado, the man, became Eldorado, fabled city of gold, likewise never found anywhere else. As meaning shifted from the “golden man” to the “golden city”, adventurers from Sir Walter Raleigh (brilliantly evoked by Charles Nicholl) to the cannibalized Colonel Fawcett have searched for this fabled metropolis of golden streets, from Manoa in the depths of the Guyanese forests to Trapalanda or City of the Caesars in Patagonia, and to Vilcabamba in Peru. Recently it was reported in the newspaper La Nación that in the northern Peruvian province of La Joya some thirty ruined Chachapoyan cities have been identified as possible contenders for Eldorado. But to get there from Lima means flying to Chiclayo, then fifteen hours by road, seven more on horse and seven more again on foot to reach 11,800 feet in the cloud forest of the Andean Amazonian slopes.

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Chapter Fifteen

Venezuela Where the Andes Meet the Caribbean Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, was the birthplace of the great liberator Simón Bolívar (1783-1830), an aristocratic Republican who died a demagogue. He gave his name to Bolivia, to the local currency and to a mountain near Caracas called Pico Bolívar, and his equestrian statue stands in the city’s main square, and countless others plazas. His country was named by Amerigo Vespucci, meaning “little Venice” because the indigenous fishermen lived in huts on stilts. (To him also is due the term “America”). Recently, the charismatic president Hugo Chávez (not Andean, but from Barinas province) renamed his country the República Bolivariana de Venezuela to include Bolívar, whose revolutionary Pan-Americanism he emulates. As a country, Venezuela is part tropical, with a long Caribbean coast and a Caribbean-Spanish culture. It also contains vast plains and the Orinoco jungle watershed, explored by Humboldt and fictionalized in Doña Bárbara and Canaima by the great realist novelist Rómulo Gallegos (1884-1969), born in Caracas and president, for five months in 1948. Venezuela is not usually considered to be an Andean country, except for the way that Caracas, like La Paz, Quito and Cali, lies in a narrow valley surrounded by omnipresent lush mountains.

The Andes Imagined (12); Lisa St. Aubin de Terán’s THE

HACIENDA

Mérida is the capital of Andean Venezuela and home to the campus of the Universidad de Los Andes. The city was founded early in 1558 and stands at 5,368 feet. It is surrounded by snow-covered peaks, including the highest in Venezuela, inevitably called Pico Bolívar, at 16,389 feet, with a bust of the liberator on the top. Other mountains are named after friends of Bolívar such as Humboldt (16,176 feet) and Bompland (misspelled 231

Caracas: city of skyscrapers

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from Bonpland, 15,980 feet). Neither Humboldt nor Bonpland ever reached Mérida. Lisa St. Aubin de Terán, the daughter of the Guyanese poet, novelist and essayist Jan Carew, put this region on the literary map with a series of novels and an autobiography. When she was a rebellious sixteen-yearold she met a Venezuelan landowner, Jaime Terán, on the run for political reasons, married him and lived on his hacienda near Valera, on a meseta off the northern Andean range, for seven years. On the farm she was always a foreigner, a musiua (derived from the French “monsieur”), as strange as a Martian she said, but this state of not belonging allowed her to observe. Her first novel, the fresh and evocative The Keepers of the House (1982), recreated how she adapted to feudal life as she dealt with the fictional Beltrán clan, who had arrived in the valley on the meseta in 1785. Her novel records the end of the local town, Mendoza Fría, “with so much past and no future” (like García Márquez’s Macondo, wiped off the map at the end of his novel). She returned to this experience in a memoir, The Hacienda (1997), correcting the romantic treatment of loss that had coloured the novel. In the memoir the learning curve is painful; her husband is violent and sick, the place lacks all the comforts of modernity, beyond the huts in the village “there is nothing”. She captures movingly that encounter with Andean isolation, yet another “country of the blind”. In Europe she is told “it was in the Andes, never anywhere specific, just ‘en los Andes’, as though this mythical hacienda were the heart, the living core of a great mountain range.” She had always longed to belong, being half-foreign, shy and introverted: “It became my ambition to go to the Andes, to live there off unspeakably hot chilli peppers and tropical fruit.” After sailing first class with her husband to Caracas, then driving for ten hours to Valera (also known as La Caldera, crater, where gossip and scandal thrive) she reached Mendoza Fría and the hacienda Santa Rita with its hills of sugar cane and factory chimney. She began living in a hammock in a house without a bathroom, during the rainy season. While her husband disappeared for days on end, she grew hungry, trapped by the formality of the place and gossip. Her isolation and loneliness were reinforced by what women were expected to do and by the self-containment of the estate. The nature of time changed:

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“With so much past and no future”: the village of Los Nevados, near Mérida

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Over the spread of the seven years that I spent in the Andes, the days dragged into months and years often with a relentless nothingness crushed by the roller blades of routine. The cog wheels of the elements undid what the people with their ant-like toil had done. Storms, floods, earthquakes, fires and disease ruled over the hills and valleys with an incomprehensible tyranny. The uncertainty of life swung like random blades cutting the people down without any warning. Life had to be lived for the day, the future was always too unsure. It gave the peasants a fine sense of humour…

Her memoir brings to life the people, her predicaments and her mentally sick husband, prone to sleeping sickness and suicide pacts, so that we enter into an atmosphere of eerie and timeless melancholy. Even the Spanish spoken was different, as she noted: “The Spanish of the Venezuelan Andes is elaborate and archaic. Andeans look down on the rest of the country and the rest of Venezuela looks down on Andeans. The Spanish of the hacienda was full of pure Latin and Arabic words. It was formal to a degree, it was courtly.” Later, she realized that in the Andes the informal “tu” (thou) was never used, except to animals.

Arepas and Ají In the Venezuelan Andes, as evoked by St. Aubin de Terán, maize dough arepas rule. During a wake the kitchen becomes an arepa factory. A woman with muscular upper arms kneads a “great snowball of ground white Indian corn and water”, twisting off ping-pong ball sizes. These are then flattened with the heel of the hand and piled up on enamel plates before being griddled on a cast-iron hot plate, with smoke everywhere, for the kitchen has no windows. She comes to understand that a Venezuelan woman who cannot make a perfect arepa is not a woman. One can fill hot arepas or use them with dips, a mojo de huevos (eggs, garlic, onion, coriander and salt), and some ají (hot chilli peppers) is always added to give a kick, she wrote, “that made you see stars and weep.” Ají was served with every meal, even breakfast. The Venezuelan novelist José Napoleón Oropeza once cooked these polenta-like maize balls for us in London, but not being Andean, we couldn’t taste the magic. Over her seven years in Venezuela, St. Aubin de Terán, though nominally the mistress, of the house learned to cook in the Andean peasant 235

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way. In The Hacienda she lists what she was taught: guiso (stew) was the basic meal. She had to soak black beans in bicarbonated soda water and then cook them for four hours. To these she added tomato, onion, garlic and fresh coriander (not a native herb, but ubiquitous in Latin America). The oil was coloured orange by onoto seeds, which she picked in the wild. She learned to cook arepas and chilli fritters. If foods have opposites, the ají or chilli pepper of the genus Capsicum is the opposite of the arepa. Roberto Payró, in Catamarca in the 1890s, lamented that Andean cooking had been replaced by European dishes. Most Andean dishes contained hot peppers, and local food was always “picante” (stinging). In fact, ají made the eater “roar” as it can “pull tears from stones.” Silverberg records the Chibcha custom in New Granada where women suspected of adultery were forced to eat hot peppers until the pain made them “confess”. We also saw how indigenous Peruvians traditionally plunged ají into a bull’s anus to make it fight the condor tied to its back. For the Inca Garcilaso, writing in Spain in the early 1600s, ají was the most essential ingredient in Andean cooking; it was added to everything. He called it uchu, which the Spaniards in Cuzco renamed “pimiento de las Indias”. The hotter the better, he wrote, closing his chapter saying that “the Indians hold it in higher esteem than all the other fruits I have named.” Ají can also have sexual connotations; César Vallejo’s opaque 1922 masterpiece Trilce, poem XXX (all the poems are titled by Roman numerals) opens: “Burn of the second/throughout the tender fleshbud of desire,/sting of vagurant chili/at two in the immoral afternoon.” Maybe Andean people like their peppers so hot because it can be so cold outside. Few people realise that ají was brought to India and the East from the Andes, crushed into paste, the basis of curry, so that Crosby can boast that the “ubiquitous chutney and curry are unimaginable without American chile.” Luis Valcárcel believed that the Andean fondness for chilli pepper defined the region as a “dietary cornerstone”, in Sophie Coe’s words. After two months on the road, covering 4,000 miles, George Woodcock and his wife Inga started to hate Peru. He picked on the “biting mixture of urine and ají” as the most loathsome experience. Tschiffely once tried an ají in Quito and the first mouthful was like “glowing coal”.

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Conrad’s Andes Polish-born sea-captain Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904) is a massive feat of the imagination. Conrad invented a South American country, its history, geography, politics, flag and even an apocryphal book about it all, and in this place named Costaguana inserted revolutionaries, dictators, European exiles, a silver mine and violent passions. He sprinkled his novel with terms in Spanish from all over the continent, so that later readers located its events in Chile, in Mexico, in Central America, in Colombia (Santa Marta is often mentioned) but mainly Venezuela, where Conrad himself placed it. In an author’s note Conrad claims that he spent some two years in South America, but in a letter to a friend he shrank this to three days. In fact, he was twelve and a half hours in Puerto Cabello, knew Robert Cunninghame Graham, and read much. He invented Higuerota, the Andean mountain that Theroux thought was modelled on Chimborazo, as it ominously “soared out of the shadows of rock and earth like a frozen bubble under the moon.” The peak dominates the novel and the fictional town of Sulaco so much that Arnold Bennett thought it should have given the novel its title. Conrad picked the name from his reading of Humboldt, who in his account crossed “Higuerote”, a group of tall mountains between Caracas and the state of Aragua. Conrad’s first description of it is from the sea as “bare clusters of enormous rocks [that] sprinkle with tiny black dots the smooth dome of snow.” It shelters the San Tomé silver mine inside it, here clearly based on the silver hill of Potosí, its miners bare-footed Indians and its owners North Americans. The mine dominates social and economic life, a “power in the land”, as its ingots are packed off to San Francisco. These imagined riches prompt Conrad to envision Latin America as one large “treasure-house” to be plundered. The lonely, unloved English wife of the Administrator, Mrs. Gould, has a vision that sums up Conrad’s view of the Andes, and of silver: She saw the San Tomé mountain hanging over the Campo, over the whole land, feared, hated, wealthy; more soulless than any tyrant, more pitiless and autocratic than the worst Government; ready to crush innumerable lives in the expansion of its greatness. He did not see it.

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Mrs Gould’s prophetic vision of how wealth and material interest degrade her law-abiding English husband is at the core of the novel’s analysis of raw capitalism and imperialism. Nostromo’s accidental death is directly caused by the silver he has hidden away on an island, for he feels that everything else is sham, only “the treasure was real.” He does not find freedom, but a craven form of slavery. That, for Conrad, is the lesson of the Andean mine. A corollary is an anecdote from Colin Thubron’s novel about a trek over Peru’s eastern Andes when his well-healed characters come across an abandoned silver mine called Minas Victorias. One of the muleteers muttered in Quechua: “This is an evil place, The Spaniards pissed on us here.” Peruvian Daniel Alarcón’s written-in-English story “The Idiot President” has his travelling actor reach a town called San Germán, an archetypal silver mine “that seemed to have been airlifted to the wind-battered top of a desolate mountain, which was surrounded on three sides by an even higher, more forboding peaks.” The narrator realized that “all mining towns are the same,” at least when they are converted into words.

Caracas What defines Caracas and Venezuela is oil. Oil wealth has never filtered down to the masses, but it drew them to the city. In 1941, 300,000 lived there; today there are some six million, including over a million immigrants since the 1950s. Caracas stands at 3,000 feet, and the poor have built, and continue to build, their shanties up the steep hillsides. With its motorways, skyscrapers—more than in any other Latin American city— and its demolition of the colonial past, the modern, affluent centre appears North American. The US poet Robert Lowell visited Caracas in 1967 and wrote a sonnet that opens: “Through another of our cities without a center, as hideous/as Los Angeles, and with as many cars/per head…” He ends referring to the city’s endemic violence: “this pioneer democracy, built/on foundations, not of rock, but blood as hard as rock.” For a long time it was a dangerous city to stroll in and cars dominate the cityscape. Caracas-born poet Rafael Arraíz Lucca rages in a poem that his children will never know his city as “blessed builders have not left one house standing” and constantly change street names. Until Chávez’s arrival, Venezuela tended to be ignored within Latin American cultural politics. It produced great newspapers, publishing 238

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houses and realist and historical writers (Uslar Pietri, Gallegos, Garmendia, Meneses) and poets, but no great novel that defined the complex city of Caracas for outsiders. Caracas received illustrious exiles like Angel Rama, Isabel Allende, Tomás Eloy Martínez and Alejo Carpentier, who lived there from 1945 to 1959. His great novel Los pasos perdidos (1953) explores the Orinoco hinterlands after his narrator rejects an alienating skyscraper city that could be Caracas as much as New York. The Andean experience of living on the slopes in Caracas was revealed by Salvador Garmendia (1928-2001) in his novel Los habitantes (1961), whose title refers to slum-dwelling caraqueños. One of the pioneers of the “telenovela” (the hugely popular TV soap opera), Garmendia was an iconoclast and was once brought to trial for obscenity. His novel about one day in the life of the family of a lorry driver opens with a young woman waking up on a fiesta day in a shack with a dirt floor on a steep, overcrowded street under a mountain. A young man, Francisco, observes how the “mountain seems to bulge out, shining and compact… The unequal facades of the one-story shacks descend in steps following the brusque street slope.” Social life lacks privacy, is noisy and dramatic, perhaps shaped by the steep mountainsides. The shanties of “el cerro” are made of unpainted cement blocks, and sparkle with lights at night. Garmendia insisted that middle-class intellectuals knew nothing about life up there, embodied in the “malandros”, tough, trigger-happy thugs. In a short poem titled “Oblique”, Rafael Arraíz Lucca suggests how the mountains condition Caracas life: The mountain shanties are behind me, but I don’t turn round to look at them: their reflection is clearer on window panes. Midday clarity can only be seen from shade, with dark glasses on. I’ve seen the sea from the mountain because, when I’m in its waves I make a big effort to pick out the mountains’ pattern.

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Humboldt and La Silla Alexander von Humboldt arrived in the New World with his secretary and companion Aimé Bonpland at Cumaná on 16 July 1799. Five months later they travelled to Caracas, where one chain of the Andes begins (or ends) as it dips into the sea to resurface intermittently as the archipelago of Caribbean islands. The naturalists rented a house for two months that looked up to La Silla, meaning “saddle”, between two peaks, which they naturally scaled (now there is a cable lift and a Hotel Humboldt, often closed). They could not find anyone who had climbed the mountain in the new Romantic fashion, and Humboldt scorned the locals: “They are used to a dull domestic life and avoid fatigue and sudden changes in climate.” They were lent guides who knew the smugglers’ tracks, and left at five in the morning. Eighteen people walked up in single file. As they slipped on the thick grass, most of them turned back. Humboldt, as ever, was fussy about the instruments being carried up. He noted that the Indians were taciturn and the black slaves chatty and jovial. They studied plants in the puna zone. Then, as they cut their way through tropical vegetation with machetes, a mist fell. They waited and decided to eat, but all the food had already been eaten, with just some olives left. The Pico Oriental stands at 8,576 feet, near the great cliff that falls to the coast. Humboldt measured the topography as hairy bees called “little angels” settled all over him, but hardly ever stung. They returned home at ten at night, after a fifteen-hour walk. They had been followed through binoculars and had measured the peaks above La Silla, finding them lower than summits in the Pyrenees. This zone above the city, El Avila, is now a national park, with another, lower peak in the range called Humboldt standing at 7,067 feet.
From Caracas, where the Andes finally sink into the Caribbean Sea, it seems a good point to end this journey down the world’s longest mountain range. I have tried to explore what makes these mountains unique and to show how the Andes themselves both condition and challenge the images we may have of South America. Beyond arbitrary national boundaries, they snake down South America, encompassing a plethora of habitats and cultures, some long-gone and others still alive. 240

La Silla and the Hotel Humboldt look down on Caracas

THE ANDES

The Andes were home to spectacular pre-conquest civilizations like Tiahuanaco and the Inca empire at Cuzco, where stone work, roads, temples, weaving, music, social organization (lack of poverty and collective property) and agriculture stand out. The steep Andean slopes and deep valleys contain and protect a rich biodiversity that gave us the potato, quinoa, coca and more. This highland civilization is all the more stunning if we see the Andes as inhospitable, with forbidding peaks, deep, dangerous valleys, mountain passes, turbulent rivers and the icy winds that everybody curses. It is such a harsh life that it is vanishing. People from the Andes now throng cities like Bolivia’s El Alto, one of the largest makeshift indigenous cities in the Americas. Felicita Salva Plácido spoke for these innumerable Andean migrants when she told Sven Lindqvist: “My father still lives in the sierra, but I have never thought of going back. Here [in Lima] you can at least get work, you can eat and have a little money. In the sierra, when the harvest is bad, you starve, and the following year you have no seed and things just get worse and worse. There’s hardly anyone still living in my village now.” The rest of us can only visit, unable to live easily where the Andes rob us of air and make us sick while we glimpse sheer inhuman beauty. Perhaps, in the end, it is better to read the words of those who were inspired by this terrible and majestic landscape and who also left.

242

Further Reading General Bibliographies for further reading: Leslie Bethell, ed, The Cambridge History of Latin America Vol. XI. Bibliographic Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; Daniel Balderstone, Mike Gonzalez and Ana M. López, eds, Encyclopedia of Contemporary Latin American and Caribbean Cultures, vol. 3, London: Routledge, 2000; Barbara Tenebaum, ed, Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture, vol. 5, New York: Scribner’s, 1996. Search also ‘Internet Resources for Latin America’ and LANIC. Ades, Dawn, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820-1980. London: The South Bank Centre, 1989. Alarcón, Daniel, “Peru, the Padlocked Town”, BBC Radio 3, 17 February 2008. Alarcón, Daniel, “The Idiot President”, The New Yorker, 6 October 2008. Alden Mason, J., The Ancient Civilizations of Peru. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957. Alegría, Ciro, Broad and Ancient Is the World. Translated by Harriet de Onís, New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1941. Alegría, Ciro, Los perros hambrientos. Santiago: Zig-Zag, 1965. Alegría, Ciro, Mucha suerte con harto palo: Memorias. Lima: Editorial La Oveja Negra, 1980. Allende, Isabel, Mi país inventado. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2003. Allende, Isabel, Inés of My Soul. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden, London: Harper Collins, 2006. Andrien, Kenneth J., Andean Worlds: Indigenous History, Culture and Consciousness Under Spanish Rule, 1532-1825. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001. Arguedas, Alcides, Raza de bronce. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1966. Arguedas, José María, Deep Rivers. Translated by Frances Barraclough, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978. Armstrong, Kate, Maric, Vesna and Symington, Andy, Bolivia. Footscray: Lonely Planet, 2007. Bakewell, Peter, Silver and Entrepreneurship in Seventeenth-Century Potosí: The Life and Times of Antonio López de Quiroga. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988. 243

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Baraza de Vargas, Lidia, Historia de Tucumán. Buenos Aires: A-Z Ediciones, 1994. Beals, Carleton, Fire on the Andes. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1934. Bingham, Hiram, Inca Land: Explorations in the Highlands of Peru. London: Constable, 1922. Bonney, T. G., Volcanoes, their Structure and Significance. London: John Murray, 1902. Botelho Gosálvez, Raúl, Altiplano: Novela india. Buenos Aires: Ayacucho, 1945. Botting, Douglas, Humboldt and the Cosmos. London: Sphere Books, 1973. Box, Ben, ed, South American Handbook. Bath: Trade and Travel Publications, 1991. Brunet, Marta, Montaña adentro. Santiago: Nascimiento, 1933. Caballero Calderón, Eduardo, El Cristo de espaldas. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1952. Caillois, Roger, Cases d’un échiquier. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. Chaves, Fernando, El hombre ecuatoriano y su cultura. Quito: Ediciones del Banco Central, 1990. Coe, Sophie D., America’s First Cuisines. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Cole, Peter, Hermon, Gabrielle and Martin, Mario Daniel, eds, Language in the Andes. Newark: University of Delaware, 1994. Concolorcorvo, El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1997. Conrad, Joseph, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. Crosby Jr., Alfred, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1972. Cunninghame Graham, R. B., The Conquest of New Granada. London: Heinemann, 1927. Daniels, Anthony, Coups and Cocaine: Two Journeys in South America. London: Century, 1986. Darwin, Charles, The Voyage of the Beagle. Geneva: Heron Books, 1968. Daumal, René, Le Mont Analogue. Paris: Gallimard, 1952. Denegri, Francesca, El abanico y la cigarrera. Lima: IEP/Flora Tristán, 1996. 244

Further Reading

Edison Vergara, Raúl, Bariloche mi amor. Bariloche: Puppy Zuker Productions, 1995. Ercilla, Alonso de, The Historie of Araucana. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1964. Escadillo, Tomás G., “Scorza antes del último combate”, Hispamérica, no. 55, 1990, 51-72. Evans, Polly, On a Hoof and a Prayer: Around Argentina at a Gallop. London: Bantam, 2006. Farson, Negley, Transgressor in the Tropics. London: Gollancz, 1937. Feinstein, Adam, Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life. London: Bloomsbury, 2004. Fermor, Patrick Leigh, Three Letters from the Andes. London: John Murray, 1991. Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, Food: A History. London: Macmillan, 2001. Flores, Augusto, De Buenos Aires a Nueva York a pie. Barcelona: Editorial Cervantes, 1931. Flores Galindo, Alberto, Buscando un inca: Identidad y utopía en los Andes. Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1986. Floria, Carlos Alberto and García Belsunce, César, Historia de los argentinos, vol. 2, Buenos Aires : Larousse, 1992. Fonrouge, José Luis, Horizontes verticales en la Patagonia. Buenos Aires: El Elefante Blanco, 2006. Galeano, Eduardo, Faces and Masks. Translated by Cedric Belfrage, London: Minerva, 1989. García Márquez, Gabriel, Vivir para contarla. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2002. Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales de los Incas, 2 vols, Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1943. Goodman, Edward J., The Explorers of South America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990. Gorriti, Juana Manuela, Relatos. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Nuevo Siglo, 1995. Grandidier, Ernest, Voyage, 1861. Gregory, Desmond, Brute New World: The Rediscovery of Latin America in the Early Nineteenth Century. London: British Academic Press, 1992. Groussac, Paul, El viaje intellectual. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Simurg, 2005. 245

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Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe, Nueva coronica y buen gobierno. Caracas: Ayacucho, 1980. Guevara, Ernesto Che, The Motorcycle Diaries: A Journey around South America. Translated by Ann Wright, London: Verso, 1995. Hagen, Victor Wolfgang von, The Ancient Sun Kingdoms of the Americas: Aztec, Maya, Inca. London: Thames and Hudson, 1962. Hagen, Victor Wolfgang von, The Green World of the Naturalists: A Treasury of Five Centuries of Natural History in South America. New York: Greenberg, 1948. Hagen, Victor Wolfgang von, Ecuador the Unknown: Two and a half Years’ Travels in the Republic of Ecuador and Galapagos Islands. London: Jarrolds, 1939. Head, Sir Francis B., Rough Notes taken during some journeys across the Pampas and among the Andes. London: John Murray, 1846. Hemming, John, The Conquest of the Incas. London: Macmillan, 1993. Hidalgo, Alberto, Antología personal. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1967. Higgins, James, The Literary Representation of Peru. Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002. Higgins, James, Lima. Oxford: Signal Books, 2005. Hobhouse, Henry, Seeds of Change: Six Plants that Transformed Mankind. London: Pan Books, 2002. Holton, Isaac, New Granada: Twenty Months in the Andes. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967. Hopkins, John, The South American Diaries. London: Arcadia Books, 2007. Hopkins, John, The Attempt. London: Secker & Warburg, 1968. Hopkins, John, In the Chinese Mountains: A Novel of Peru. London: Peter Owen, 1990. Hopkinson, Amanda, “The Andes of Martin Chambi”, Granta, no. 74, Summer 2001. Hosne, Roberto, Adventures in the Patagonian Andes. Translated by Carol Duggan. Buenos Aires: KEL Ediciones, 2003. Humboldt, Alexander von, Views of Nature. Translated by E. C. Otté and Henry G. Bohn. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1850. Humboldt, Alexander von, Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent. Translated by Jason Wilson, 246

Further Reading

Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1995. Humboldt, Alexander von, Mi viaje por el camino del Inca (1801-1802): Antología. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 2004. Icaza, Jorge, Huasipungo. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1968. Isaacs, Jorge, María. Translated by Rollo Ogden, New York: Harper, 1890. Isherwood, Christopher, The Condor and the Cows. London: Methuen, 1949. Jacobs, Michael, Ghost train through the Andes: On My Grandfather’s Trail in Chile and Bolivia. London: John Murray, 2006. Jaramillo de Lubensky, María, Ecuatorianismos en la literatura. Quito: Ediciones del Banco Central, 1993. Jones, Tristan, The Incredible Journey: A Personal Odyssey. London: The Bodley Head, 1977. Keenan, Brian and McCarthy, John, Between Extremes. London: Black Swan, 2000. Kellog, Susan, Weaving the Past: A History of Latin America’s Indigenous Women from the Pre-Hispanic Period to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Kristal, Efraín, The Andes Viewed from the City: Literary and Political Discourse on the Indian in Peru 1848-1930. New York: Peter Lang, 1987. Lamb, Simon, Devil in the Mountain: A Search for the Origin of the Andes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Lawlor, Eric, In Bolivia. New York: Vintage, 1989. Letras jujeñas: Antología de poesía y cuento. Jujuy: Libros del Arco Iris, 2000. Lewis, Norman, To Run across the Sea. London: Vintage, 1989. Lindqvist, Sven, The Shadow: Latin America Faces the Seventies. Translated by Keith Bradfield, Harmondsworth: Penguin,1972. Ludueña, María Eugenia, “Madres de la Tierra”, La Nación Revista, 4 March 2007, 18-27. Macfarlane, Robert, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination. London: Granta Books, 2004. McIntyre, Loren, “The High Andes”, National Geographic, April 1987, 422-459. Mann, Mark, The Gringo Trail. Chichester: Summersdale, 1999. 247

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Moro, César, Prestigio del amor. Translated by Ricardo Silva-Santisteban, Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2002. Moss, Chris, Patagonia: A Cultural History. Oxford: Signal Books, 2008. Mariátegui, José Carlos, 7 ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana. Lima: Editora Amauta, 1967. Markham, Clement, Peruvian Bark. London: John Murray, 1880. Matthiessen, Peter, The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness. London: Collins Harvill, 1988. Matto de Turner, Clorinda, Birds without a Nest. A Story of Indian Life and Priestly Oppression in Peru. Translated by J.G. Hudson, 1904. Merle, Daniel & Héctor D’Amico, “Cara a cara con el Aconcagua”, La Nación Revista, 3 February 2008, 14-23. Meyer, Gordon, Summer at High Altitude (from a diary). London: Alan Ross, 1968. Meyer, Gordon, Death in the Campo. 1963. Michaux, Henri, Ecuador. Translated by Robin Magowan, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1970. Michener, Carroll K., Heirs of the Incas: A Book about Peru. London: Methuen, 1926. Milne, Lorus J. and Milne, Margery, The Mountains. London: Time-Life International, 1963. Morales, Edmundo, The Guinea Pig: Healing, Food, and Ritual in the Andes. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995. Moreno, Franciso P., Viaje a la Patagonia austral, 1876-1877. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Solar, 1972. Moreno, Franciso P., “Explorations in Patagonia”, The Geographical Journal, September 1899, 241-269. Morris, Arthur, South America. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1987. Morrison, Tony, Land above the Clouds. London: André Deutsch, 1974. Mujica Lainez, Manuel, El arte de viajar : Antología de crónicas periodísticas (1935-1977). Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007. Murphy, Dervla, Eight Feet in the Andes. London: John Murray, 1983. Neruda, Pablo, Canto general. vol.2, Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1963. . Neruda, Pablo, Confieso que he vivido: Memorias. Buenos Aires; Losada, 1974. 248

Further Reading

Neruda, Pablo, Art of Birds. Translated by Jack Schmitt, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. Nicholl, Charles, The Creature in the Map: Sir Walter Raleigh’s Quest for El Dorado. London: Vintage, 1996. Norte Argentino. Buenos Aires: Consejo Federal de Inversiones, 2005. Onelli, Clemente, Trepando los Andes. Buenos Aires: El Elefante Blanco, 1998. Osborne, Harold, Indians of the Andes: Aymaras and Quechuas. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952. Parris, Matthew, Inca-Kola: A Traveller’s Tale of Peru. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990. Payró, Roberto J., En las tierras de Inti. Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria, 1960. Payró, Roberto J., El casamiento de Laucha; Chamijo; El falso Inca. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1940. Phelan, Nancy, The Chilean Way: Travels in Chile. London: The Travel Book Club, 1974. Poesía quechua. Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 1965. Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Prescott, William H., The Conquest of Peru. New York: Mentor Books, 1961. Prodgers, C. H., Adventures in Bolivia. London: The Bodely Head, 1922. Quesada, Vicente, Crónicas potosinas: Costumbres de la edad medieval hispano-Americana. vol. 2, Paris: Biblioteca de la Europe y América, 1890. Ray, Leslie, Language of the Land: The Mapuche in Argentina and Chile. Copenhagen: IWGIA, 2007. Read, Piers Paul, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors. London: Arrow Books, 2005. Reinhard, Johan, “Peru’s Ice Maidens”, National Geography, June 1996, 62-81. Renwick, Dr. A. M., Wanderings in the Peruvian Andes. London: Blackie, 1939. Rivera Martínez, Edgardo, País de Jauja. Lima: Peisa, 1997. Rojas, Ricardo, El santo de la espada. Buenos Aires: Anaconda, 1933. 249

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Romoli, Kathleen, Colombia. Translated by Tomás Gracián, Bogotá: Presidencia de la República, 1996. Roncagliolo, Santiago, La cuarta espada: La historia de Abimael Guzmán y Sendero Luminoso. Buenos Aires: Debate, 2007. Roncagliolo, Santiago, Abril rojo. Barcelona: Alfaguara, 2006. Saint Exupéry, Antoine, Wind, Sand and Stars. Translated by Lewis Galantière, New York: Bantam, 1945. Salas, Alberto, Guérin, Miguel and Moure, José Luis, eds, Crónicas iniciales de la conquista del Perú. Buenos Aires: Editorial Plus Ultra, 1987. Samper Ortega, Daniel, Nuestro lindo país colombiano. Bogotá: Biblioteca Familiar Presidencia de la República, 1996. Santos Chocano, José, Antología poética. Buenos Aires: Espasa- Calpe, 1947. Scorza, Manuel, Drums for Rancas. Translated by Edith Grossman, New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Shakespeare, Nicholas, “Inca Country”, Departures, March/April 1985. Shakespeare, Nicholas, “In Pursuit of Guzmán”, Granta, no. 23, Spring 1988. Shakespeare, Nicholas, The Vision of Elena Silves. 1989. Shakespeare, Nicholas, The Dancer Upstairs. 1995. The South American Handbook. London: South American Publications, 1925. Shimose, Pedro, Poemas. Madrid: Playor, 1988. Shukman, Henry, The Lost City. London: Abacus, 2007. Silverberg, Robert, The Golden Dream: Seekers of El Dorado. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985. Sitwell, Sacheverell, Golden Wall and Mirador: From England to Peru. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961. Sopeña, Germán, Francisco P. Moreno: Alma de Patagonia. Buenos Aires: Techint, 2000. Starn, Orin, Degregori, Carlos Iván and Kirk, Robin, eds, The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Stein, William W., Hualcan: Life in the Highlands of Peru. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961. Stone-Miller, Rebecca, Art of the Andes from Chavín to Inca. London: 250

Further Reading

Thames and Hudson, 2002. Symmes, Patrick, Chasing Che: A Motorcycle Journey in Search of the Guevara Legend. London: Robinson, 2000. Teran, Lisa St. Aubin de, Keepers of the House. London: Cape, 1982. Teran, Lisa St. Aubin de, The Hacienda: My Venezuelan Days. London: Virago, 1997. Theroux, Paul, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train through the Americas. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. Thomson, Hugh, A Sacred Landscape: The Search for Ancient Peru. Woodstock: The Overlook Press, 2007. Thubron, Colin, To the Last City. London: Cahtto and Windus, 2002. Tizón, Héctor, Tierras de frontera. Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2005. Tizón, Héctor, Fire in Casabindo. Translated by Miriam Frank, Quartet Books: London, 1993. Torres, Maruja, Amor América. Madrid: Santillana, 1996. Tristan, Flora, Peregrinations of a Pariah. Translated by Jean Hawkes, London: Virago, 1986. Tschiffely, A. F., Tschiffely’s Ride: Being an Account of 10,000 Miles in the Saddle Through the Americas from Argentina to Washington. London: Heinemann, 1933. Tschudi, Johann Jacob von, Travels in Peru during the Years 1838-1842 on the Coast, in the Sierra, across the Cordillera and the Andes. Translated by Thomasina Ross, London, 1847. Valcarcel, Luis E., Ruta cultural del Perú. México: FCE, 1945. Vallejo, César, Novelas y cuentos completos. Lima: Francisco Moncloa Editores, 1967. Vallejo, César, The Complete Poetry. Edited and translated by Clayton Eshleman, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Vallejo, Fernando, Our Lady of the Assassins. Translated by Paul Hammond, Serpent's Tail, London, 2001. Vargas Llosa, Mario, “The Story of a Massacre”, translated by Edith Grossman, Granta, no. 9, 1983, 62-83. Vargas Llosa, Mario, Diccionario del amante de América Latina. Barcelona: Paidós, 2006. Vargas Llosa, Mario and Corral Vega, Pablo, Andes. Washington: National Geographic Insight, 2001. Vargas Llosa, Mario, The Time of the Hero. Translated by Lysander 251

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Kemp, New York: Grove Press, 1966. Vargas Llosa, Mario, Death in the Andes. Translated by Edith Grossman, London: Faber, 1996. Vásquez, Juan Gabriel, The Informers. Translated by Anne Maclean, London: Bloomsbury, 2008. Villegas, General Conrado, Expedición al gran lago Nahuel Huapi en el año 1881. Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 1977. Weismantel, Mary, Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Whymper, Edward, Travels amongst the Great Andes of the Equator. London: John Murray, 1892. Wright, Ronald, Curt Stones and Crossroads: A Journey in the Two Worlds of Peru. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. Ygobone, Aquiles D., Francsico P. Moreno: Arquetipo de Argentinidad. Buenos Aires: Editorial Plus Ultra, 1979. Wilson, Jason, Traveller’s Literary Companion to South & Central America. Brighton: In Print, 1993. Woodcock, George, Incas and Other Men. London: Faber, 1959. Zárate, Agustín de, The Discovery and Conquest of Peru. Translated by J. M. Cohen, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.

252

Glossar y of Spanish words used. Quechua words indicated as (Q/a). abra ají (Q/a) altiplano amauta (Q/a) ambulante andén aprista

apu (Q/a) arepa ayllu (Q/a) barranco barriada/pueblo jóven cacique camino real cargador cerro charqui, charque (Q/a) chasqui (Q/a) chicha (Q/a) cholo

chumpi (Q/a) chuño comendador comunero cordillera corregidor

mountain pass chilli pepper high plains/tablelands Inca poet, reciter street vendor terrace (in Spanish usually station platform). member of APRA, Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana, founded in 1924 by the Peruvian socialist Haya de la Torre mountain god/peak/lord/governor maize dough ball or roll from the Cumangoto erepa meaning maize village, clan ravine shantytown boss/chieftain, from Carib language royal road/main road carrier/porter mountain, hill dried meat courier/relay runner fermented maize beer mestizo, of mixed Indian and white ancestry, or Andean who adopts western customs belt freeze dried Andean potatoes knight commander Andean Indian living in commune or ayllu mountain range (lit. cuerda, rope) chief magistrate 253

THE ANDES

coya (Q/a)

Inca queen, then any Indian originating from Collasuyo or southern quarter of the Inca empire creole from criollo meaning people or customs from before independence from Spain cueca folkdance in Chile and down all Pacific coast of Latin America curandero/a witchdoctor, shaman cuy (Q/a) guinea pig (in Sp. conejillo de Indias) cuzqueño inhabitant of Cuzco, Peru encomienda colonial system where Spanish owned their indigenous workers estofado stew (also guiso) gamonal landowner garúa sea mist gringo fair haired foreigner/North American guano (Q/a) seabird manure huaca/huaco/huaquero (Q/a) shrine, tomb/vessel/tomb raider ichu/ychu (Q/a) Andean bunch grass indigenista political/cultural term for anyone working to improve the Indians’ lot indio pejorative term for Indian Kolla (Q/a) individual from puna tribes. In Bolivia anyone who lives in the highlands latifundio/latifundista large plot of land/landowner limeño inhabitant of Lima locro stew of crushed maize with bits of meat etc maca lepidium peruvianum Chacon, Andean root with allegedly miraculous medical properties maní peanut mazamorra maize dish mendocino inhabitant of Mendoza, Argentina meseta lit. “little table”; tableland mestizo half-caste, mixed race minga (Q/a) forced labour, see mita 254

Glossary

misti mita (Q/a) montaña nevado ojota orejón pachamama (Q/a) palta (Q/a) pampa (Q/a) papa (Q/a) páramo patrón pebre picante de pollo pico (also cumbre) pinkullu (Q/a) pirca (Q/a) pisco pollera pongo (Q/a) porteño poyo pucara (Q/a) puna (Q/a) quena (Q/a) quinoa (Q/a) quiteño quipu (Q/a) reja ruana

mestizo (also a peak nr. Arequipa) obligatory public service under Incas; forced labour in mines in Peru, hilly jungle snowy peak sandal lit. “large ear”, ie Inca nobility mother-earth avocado (also aguacate) treeless high plains (in Argentina plains) potato (in Latin America; in Spain patata); batata is sweet potato. high mountain plain/tableland (see puna, altiplano) boss sauce with peppers, garlic etc hot chicken dish peak indigenous flute dry-stone wall or mound on mountain pass Strong brandy from Peruvian town of Pisco Indian dress/petticoat Indian servant/slave native of Buenos Aires, a port city stone bench or recess in wall to sit in fort high treeless plain, or mountain sickness flute Andean grain inhabitant of Quito knotted strings used to communicate information metal window bar small poncho worn in Colombia and Ecuador 255

THE ANDES

runa (Q/a) serrucho sicario sierra sindicato soroche (Q/a) tamal tambo (Q/a) tinto vallenato volcán yaraví (Q/a) Yunga (Q/a)

256

Andean Indian pejorative term for mountain dwellers (from sierra) paid assassin (from Latin) mountain range trade union high altitude sickness, see puna maize dough in banana or maize leaves (from Nahuatl) rest/store house (in Argentina dairy) black coffee in Colombia and Venezuela (red wine otherwise) song volcano sad song people from lowland, tropical area in Bolivia; the area itself

Index of Literar y & Historical Names Abad, Héctor Facio Lince 218-20 Adoum, Jorge Enrique 110 Alarcón, Daniel 73, 238 Alden Mason, J. 24, 46, 52, 123, 125 Alegría, Ciro 37, 41-5, 46, 48, 52, 53-4, 73-4, 102, 130, 201 Alencastre, Andrés 136 Allende, Isabel 26, 184, 197 Almagro, Diego de 83, 133, 166, 184, 199 Alvarado, Pedro de 93 Anchorena, Aaron 189 Andrien, Kenneth 23, 141 Andrews, Captain 141-2 Arciniegas, Germán 220 Arenas, Braulio 100 Arguedas, Alcides 10, 145-7, 148 Arguedas, José María 5, 9, 20-1, 26, 47, 51, 53, 66-8, 119 Arijón, Gonzalo 178 Atahualpa 17, 19, 75, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 90, 92, 95, 118, 153, 188 Audubon, John James 100 Axomama 116 Bakewell, Peter 139, 142 Bataille, Georges 167 Beals, Carleton 55, 74, 81, 155 Beebe, William 89 Belalcázar, Sebastián 215, 221, 225, 228 Belgrano, General Manuel 164 Bennett, Arnold 237 Berns, Augusto 28 Berry, Francis 181 Bingham, Hiram 28-9, 31, 33, 59 Blake White, Robert 215 Blakemore, Harold 145 Blanco, Hugo 51

Bogotá, Zipa 224 Bolívar, Simón 23, 51, 57, 88, 90, 96, 125, 139, 142, 162, 166, 182, 216, 224, 226, 231 Bonpland, Aimé 87, 88, 93, 101, 216, 223, 233, 240 Borges, Jorge Luis 59, 71, 167, 184, 194 Botelho Gonsálvez, Raúl 121, 129-30 Botting, Douglas 98 Boussingault, Jean-Baptiste 88 Box, Ben 166, 199 Bowles, Paul 5 Breton, André 167 Brunet, Marta 199-200 Caballero Calderón, Eduardo 221-3 Caillois, Roger 167-68 Calchaquí, Juan 166 Caldas, Francisco José de 216, 228 Carew, George 195 Carew Jan, 233 Carrera Andrade, Jorge 99, 100 Carril, Delia del 29 Caskey, William 227 Castro, Fidel 228 Caupolicán 195, 197 Cervantes, Miguel de 141, 162 Chambi, Martín 60 Chamijo, Pedro 166 Charles V, Emperor 84, 142 Chatwin, Bruce 207 Chaves, Fernando 108 Chávez, Hugo 231 Chelemín, Jan 166 Chinchón, Marquesa de 121 Chocano, José Santos 8, 38, 52, 55, 65, 123, 228 Claussen, Hermann 186 Cobo Borda, Juan Gustavo 227

257

THE ANDES

Coe, Sophie 236 Cole, Peter 47 Collohue, cacique 191 Concolorcorvo 4, 118, 142, 164 Condamine, Charles-Marie de La 77, 89, 98, 99, 121, 156 Conrad, Joseph 171, 237-8 Conway, Sir Martin 129 Corral Vega, Pablo 43 Crosby, Alfred Jr. 236 Cunningham Graham, Robert 142, 237 D’Althaus, Baron 57 Daniels, Anthony 126, 128, 137, 144 Dante, Alighieri 95, 163 Darío, Rubén 85 Darwin, Charles 1, 4, 7-8, 68, 101,102, 112, 183, 189, 205, 210, 217 Davenant, Sir William 86 Dávila Andrade, César 108 Delgado, Pancho 178 Dixie, Lady Florence 113 D’Orbigny, Alcides 144 Ducasse, Isidore (Lautréamont) 7 Edkins, Anthony 14 Edward VII, King 192 Egger, Toni 208 Ercilla, Alonso de 195-8 Eshleman, Clayton 8, 119 Evans, Polly 164 Farson, Negley 89, 110, 216 Fawcett, Col. 229 Federmann, Nikolaus 225 Feilberg, Valentín 191 Feinstein, Adam 209 Fernández-Armesto, Felipe 156 Ferrari, Casimiro 208 Fischer, Pablo 187 Fitzgerald, Sir Edward 179

258

Fitzroy, Capt. Robert 190-92 Flores, Augusto 26, 137 Flores Galindo, Alberto 6, 86, 97 Floria, Carlos Alberto 183 Fonrouge, José Luis 71, 176, 181, 207-8 Freud, Sigmund 121 Gaitán, Jorge Eliecer 221 Galeano, Eduardo 17, 125, 171 Gallegos, Rómulo 231 Gangotena, Alfredo 111 García Calderón, Ventura 9 García Belsunce, César 183 García Márquez, Gabriel 213, 220, 227-8, 233 Garcilaso, Inca 15, 17, 18, 20, 46, 68, 81, 116, 119, 120, 126, 154, 155, 236 Gauguin, Paul 58 Gerard, John 116, 119-20 Giménez Hutton, Adrián 207 Ginastera, Alberto 133 González Prada, Manuel 108 González Videla, Gabriel 208, 209 Goodman, Edward J. 75, 98, 185 Gorriti, Juana Manuela 163-4 Grant, Cary 176 Greene, Graham 64, 90, 199 Groussac, Paul 176-7, 184, 185, 1889 Guevara, Ernesto “Che”, 17, 31, 35, 125, 132, 171, 173, 189 Guillaument, Henri 174 Guzmán, Abimael 58, 62-4 Guzmán, Augusto 134 Hagen, Victor von 26, 53, 68, 84, 90, 103, 113, 114, 120,123, 152 Haigh, Samuel 182 Harvey, Robert 96 Hayworth, Rita 176 Hawks, Howard 176

Index of Literary & Historical Names

Head, Sir Francis Bond 183-4 Hemming, John 20, 25, 32, 33, 46, 62, 75, 82, 84, 85, 92, 117, 131, 141, 152 Herzog, Werner 208 Heyerdahl, Thor 126 Hidalgo, Alberto 58-9 Hobhouse, Henry 122 Hogberg, Juan 194 Holton, Isaac 68, 217, 226, 228 Hopkins, John 5, 130, 149-150, 155 Hopkinson, Amanda 60 Hosne, Roberto 179, 197 Huallpa 139 Huayna Capac 17, 38 75, 76, 79, 95, 104, 139 Huascar 17, 79 Hudson, W. H. 100 Huidobro, Vicente 111 Humboldt, Alexander von 7, 10, 20, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 93, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 129, 103, 139, 171, 179, 215-6, 222, 223, 225-6, 228, 231, 237, 240 Hungerford Holdich, Sir Thomas 193 Hutchinson, R. C. 150-52 Ibsen, Henrik 204-5 Icaza, Jorge 47, 105-111, 118 Inti 15, 164 Isaacs, Jorge 220-1 Isherwood, Christopher 90, 95, 127, 136, 137, 216, 227 Jacobs, Michael 133, 144-5, 149 Jaramillo Libensky, María 109 Jerez, Francisco de 79, 154 Jones, Tristan 4, 19, 131-2 Juan, Jorge 98 Kammerer, Gustavo 187 Keenan, Brian 171, 209 Kellog, Susan 107

Kessler, Stephen 31 Kristal, Efraín 9 Lamb, Simon 1, 78, 115-6, 133, 213 Lange, Gunardo 194 Lange, Norah 194 Lautaro 195, 197 Lavalle, General Juan Galo de 166-7 Lawlor, Eric 2, 116, 126 Lawrence, D. H. 204 Leigh Fermor, Patrick 6, 17, 25, 28, 55, 130, 136 León, Cieza de 83-4, 123, 141 Lewis, Norman 113 Liempichu 147 Lindqvist, Sven 5, 141, 242 Link, George & Adrienne 179-81 López y Planes, Vicente 186 López de Quiroga, Antonio 142 Lyell, Charles 1 Lynch, John 88 Macfarlane, Robert 4, 88, 191 MacIntyre, Loren 4, 73, 179, 198 Maestri, Cesari 208 Magnone, Guido 205 Manco Inca 25, 32-3 Mann, Mark 97, 141 Mariátegui, José Carlos 19, 37, 62-3 Markham, Clement 122 134, 137 Marshall, Frank 178 Mascardi, Niccolò 185, 187 Matthiessen, Peter 25, 119, 127 Matto de Turner, Clorinda 21-2, 46 McCarthy, John 171, 209 McGahan, Gerry 8 Meiling, Otto 186 Menéndez, Fray 186, 189 Mermoz, Jean 174 Meyer, Gordon 117, 118, 120, 128, 136, 141, 144, 203-5 Michaux, Henri 111-12 Michener, Carroll K. 133, 154

259

THE ANDES

Mieggs, Henry 62, 114 Miers, John 102 Miller, Jack 210 Milne, Lorus & Margery 2 Mistral, Gabriela 201 Montúfar, Carlos 87, 93 Morales, Edmundo 156 Morales, Evo 4, 125 Moreno, Francisco “Perito” 185, 186, 187-9, 190-92, 193, 194, 205-7, 208, 210 Morrison, Tony 9, 129, 149 Mujica Lainez, Manuel 133, 153 Murphy, Dervla 45, 66, 71, 77 Murra, John 5 Mutis, José Celestino 225 Nahuelquir, cacique Ňancuche 194 Neruda, Pablo 7, 23, 29-31, 32, 90, 98, 100, 102, 143, 171, 173, 195, 208-9 Newbery, Jorge 176-7 Newton, Isaac 98 Nicholl, Charles 229 Niles, Blair 4, 13, 86, 89, 92 Ocampo, Victoria 167, 169, 186, 187 Onelli, Clemente 8, 10, 155, 192-4 Orellana, Francisco de 77 Oropeza, José Napoleón 235 Orwell, George 19 Osborne, Harold 123, 126, 134, 153 Pachacuti Yupanqui 17, 21, 25, 28 Pachamama 18, 116, 130, 165 Parris, Matthew 55, 69, 73 Pavón, José Antonio 74, 75 Parrado, Nando 178 Payró, Roberto 10, 164-6, 236 Peck, Annie 73, 129 Pemberton, John 121 Perón, Juan Domingo 7 Pfann, Hans 129 Philip II, King 121, 166, 195

260

Pishtako 40, 63 Pizarro, Francisco 5, 15, 17, 20, 28, 62, 75, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 93, 133, 215 Pizarro, Gonzalo 32 Pizarro, Hernando 75, 116 Pizarro, Juan 25 Pizarro, Pedro 153 Plüschow, Gunther 177 Prescott, William 12, 15, 18, 20, 46, 75, 82, 83, 87 Prodgers, C. H. 4, 10, 12, 118, 128, 136-7, 149 Purrán, cacique 197 Quesada, Vicente 141 Quesada, Gonzalo Jiménez de 225 Raimondi, A. 59 Raleigh, Sir Walter 229 Rama, Angel 52 Ray, Leslie 198 Read, Piers Paul 177-8 Reichert, Federico 186 Reinhard, Johan 24, 198 Reiss, Dr. W. 90 Renwick, Dr. A. M. 114, 115 Rivers Martínez, Edgardo 76 Roca, General Julio 184, 190, 191 Rojas, Gonzalo 102 Rojas, Ricardo 182, 183 Romoli, Kathleen 218, 228, 229 Roncagliolo, Santiago 64-5 Rosas, Manuel 163, 166, 167 Rugendas, Johann Moritz 76 Ruiz López, Hipólito 74, 75 Rulfo, Juan 110, 161 Sabato, Ernesto 166-7 Saénz, Manuela 96, 226-7 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de 173-6 Sanín Cano, Baldomero 216 San Martín, General José 23, 46, 166,

Index of Literary & Historical Names

177, 181-3 Sapa Inca 15, 21 Sarmiento, Domingo 7, 165 Sarmiento de Gamboa Pedro, 210 Schroeder, Barbet 217 Scorza, Manuel 4, 47, 48-52, 154, 156 Shaffer, Peter 85 Shaihueque, cacique Valentín 186, 187, 188 Shakespeare, Nicholas 9, 55-7, 62-4 Shakespeare, William 117 Shimose, Pedro 132-3, 143-4, 149, 236 Shoumatoff, Alex 77 Shukman, Henry 117, 120, 132 Silva, José Asunción 216, 217 Silverberg, Robert 225 Sitwell, Sacheverell 17, 18, 93, 133, 134 Sopeña, Germán 207 Squier, E. George 17, 32 St. Aubin de Terán, Lisa 231-6 Stein, William 6, 41, 153 Steffen, Hans 189 Stone-Miller, Rebecca 18, 71, 152 Strong, Simon 64 Sucre, General José Antonio de 98, 125 Symmes, Patrick 17, 47, 173, 189 Tello, Julio 71 Terray, Lionel 205 Thays, Carlos 165 Theroux, Paul 17, 26, 32, 95, 110, 114, 134, 137, 221, 223-4, 227, 237 Thomson, Hugh 24-5, 32, 68, 71, 73 Thorne, Dr. James 96 Thubron, Colin 33, 52, 238 Tizón, Héctor 159-63, 164 Torres, Maruja 23, 63, 89, 96, 136, 142

Traba, Marta 52 Tristan, Flora 13, 57-58, 102 Tschiffely, Aimé Félix 5, 12, 13, 62, 67-8, 118, 125, 132, 133, 134, 141, 142, 213, 215, 223, 226, 236 Tschudi, Johann Jacob von 69, 75 Tupac Yupanqui 38, 95, 123 Túpac Amaru, José Gabriel 22-3, 137, 162 Tupaj Catari 134 Turner, Walter James 90 Ulloa, Antonio de 98 Valcárcel, Luis 6, 18, 236 Valencia, Guillermo 216-7 Vallejo, César 8, 35-9, 44, 53, 63, 76, 119, 145, 236 Vallejo, Fernando 217-8 Valverde, Vicente de 81, 82, 84, 86 Vargas Llosa, Mario 13, 19, 39-41, 55, 58, 59, 60, 63, 83, 96, 100, 205 Vasconcelos, José 201 Vásquez, Juan Gabriel 224 Vergara, Edison 185, 186 Vespucci, Amerigo 231 Viedma, Antonio de 207 Villamil de Rada, Emeterio 126 Villegas, Col Conrado 187 Viracocha 15, 126 Waraka, Kilko, 113 Weismantel, Mary 119, 132 Wells, H. G. 60, 87, 89 Wilder, Thornton 14, 69 Whymper, Sir Edward 88-89, 92, 93, 99 Woodcock, George 24, 77, 153, 236 Wright, Ronald 12, 25, 26, 46, 47, 86, 113, 114

261

THE ANDES

Zárate, Agustín 12, 18, 24, 46, 68, 79, 81, 82, 83, 85, 93, 116, 118, 120

Zárate, Miguel 24 Zürbriggen, Matias 179

Index of Places & Landmarks Abancay 66-7 Abra Pampa 162 Aconcagua (peak) 59, 68, 177, 17983, 189 Amazon 77, 98, 163 Ampato (peak) 59 Andahuaylas 66 Andalgalá 167 Antofagasta 125, 145, 173 Aobamba (river) 68 Apurímac (river) 33, 45, 66, 68, 69, 77 Arequipa 24, 35, 39, 41, 55-9, 60, 77, 102, 114, 131, 144, 150, 154, 155 Argentino (lake) 177, 191, 194 Arica 102, 171 Armenia 223 Atacatzho (peak) 112 Aucanquilcha (peak) 198 Ausangate (peak) 15, 24, 114 Ayacucho 47, 62-5, 81 Ayoayo 134 Bahía Blanca 173 Bariloche 184-6, 188, 198 Bering Straits 2 Bío Bío (river) 197 Bogotá 52, 68, 110, 213, 221, 222, 223, 224-8 Bompland (peak) 231 Buenaventura 220, 221 Buenos Aires 29, 62, 97, 100, 102,

262

111, 133, 134, 142, 146, 163, 165, 166, 167, 174, 184, 186, 187, 188, 222 Cajabamba 45 Cajamarca 19, 42, 67, 75, 79-89, 118, 129 Calbuco (peak) 188 Cali 213, 221, 231 Cali (river) 221 Callao 13, 131 Callejón de Huaylas 6, 9, 73, 74 Cañar 103 Caracas 213, 231, 233, 237, 238-9 Cartama (river) 218 Catamarca 10, 164, 165, 236 Cauca, (river/valley) 150, 213, 215, 220, 223 Cautín (river) 199 Cayambe (peak) 99 Centinela (island) 190 Cerro Catedral (peak) 186, 187 Cerro Chapelco (peak) 205 Cerro Chochoconday (peak) 45 Cerro Chuquina 164 Cerro Churuquella (peak) 144 Cerro de Claros (peak) 164 Cerro de la Eme (peak) 215 Cerro de la Gloria 176 Cerro Huancacala (peak) 50 Cerro El Manchao (peak) 165 Cerro Juncal (peak) 177 Cerro López (peak) 186

Index of Places & Landmarks

Cerro Morado (peak) 161 Cerro Murallón (peak) 208 Cerro Paine (peak) 208 Cerro Turani (peak) 149 Chacaltaya 128 Chachani (peak) 55, 59 Chaltén (peak) 194 Chavín de Huantar 71-3 Chiclaya 154 Chiloé (island) 189, 195 Chimborazo (peak) 87-90, 99, 113, 122, 237 Chimbote 5, 6, 114 Chiquián 70 Choquequirau 33 Chos Malal 193 Chungara (lake) 171 Chuquicamata 145, 171-3, 198 Coaza 60 Cochabamba 115, 149-50 Colca Valley 24, 59-60 Colloa 116 Collón Cura (river) 187, 188 Colorado (river) 209 Comodoro Rivadavia 173, 176 Concepción 102 Corazón (peak) 99, 112 Cordillera Blanca 6, 45, 71, 73, 74, 77 Cordillera Central 213 Cordillera Negra 6, 73 Cordillera Occidental 213, 228 Cordillera Sarmiento 210 Corongo 73 Coropuna (peak) 59 Cotopaxi (peak) 87, 90-2, 99, 100, 112 Cuenca 103 Cumaná 100-1, 240 Cundinamarca 228 Cuzco (Cusco) 5, 15-25, 28, 29, 35, 38, 45, 58, 60, 62, 65, 79, 82, 95, 96, 100, 113, 114, 117, 118, 121,

122, 123, 139, 147, 154, 184, 236, 242 El Altar (peak) 103 El Alto 133-4, 136, 242 El Obispo (peak) 144 Elqui valley 201 Esmeralda (lake) 188 Espíritu Pampa 33 Fetaleufú (river) 194 Fitzroy [Chaltén] (peak) 205, 207-8 Galeras (peak) 213 Guagua Pichincha (peak) 97 Guatavita (lake) 225, 226, 228 Guayaquil 5, 82, 89, 105, 182 Guillaumet (peak) 207 Gutiérrez (lake) 186 Hualanca 114 Hualcán 6, 41, 54, 153 Hualfín 166 Huanachuco 114 Huánuco 5, 74 Huancare 51 Huancayo 62, 154, 155 Huandoy (peak) 69 Huaraz 69, 70 Huascarán (peak) 114 Huayna Picchu (peak) 28 Humahuaca 163 Humboldt (peak) 231 Ibague 223 Illampú (peak) 126, 129, 130 Illimani (peak) 133, 134, 136, 137, 138, 146 Illiniza (peak) 93, 99 Imbabura (peak) 111 Iruya 163 Isla Negra 29

263

THE ANDES

Jauja 75-7 Javirac (peak) 99 Jericó (peak) 220 Jujuy 159, 161, 162, 164, 167, 207 Junín 48, 51, 156 Junín de los Andes 188 Jura 129 Lácar (lake) 193, 205 Ladero de las Vacas (pass) 183 Lanín (peak) 193 La Oculta (peak) 220 La Paz 2, 123, 125, 126, 130, 127, 129, 132, 133-38, 136, 137, 139, 145, 149, 153, 231 La Quiaca 159, 163, 167 La Quinua 62 La Rinconada 35 Latacunga 92, 97 Lautaro (peak) 208 Licanpur (peak) 145 Lilpela (pass) 209 Lima 5, 13, 15, 22, 35, 42, 62, 63, 64, 73, 76, 96, 102, 114, 142, 163, 182, 242 Limay (river) 187, 193 Llactapata 32 Llaima (peak) 199 Llamac 70 Llanquihue (lake) 188 Llulaillaco (peak) 198 Loja 77, 121-122 Londres 166 Los Andes 201 Los Farallones (peak) 220, 221 Los Patos (pass) 182 Lucanamarca 65 Maca 60 Machu Picchu 12, 26-32, 35, 55, 57, 125, 142, 150, 208 Magdalena (river) 213, 223, 225, 226, 226, 227, 228

264

Maipu (peak) 174 Marabamba (peak) 74 Medellín 213, 217-20, 221, 224 Meiggs (peak) 114 Mendoza 102, 176, 177, 179, 182, 183 Mendoza Fría 233 Mérida 231 Mermoz (peak) 207 Mexico City (México DF) 133 Minaspata (peak) 77 Misti (peak) 55, 57, 59 Mollendo 62, 127 Monserrate (peak) 226 Nahuel Huapi (lake) 185, 186, 187, 189, 193 Nasca 100 Nazca plate 1 Neuquén 192, 197 Nevado Amparo (peak) 24, 77 Nevado de Chañi (peak) 161, 207 Nevado Huasacarán (peak) 69, 73, 74 Nevado Mismi (peak) 77 Nevado de Quindío (peak) 223 Nevado de Ruiz (peak) 226 Nevado Sabancaya (peak) 24 Nevado de Sorata/Illampu (peak) 129 Ocangate 25 Ollantaytambo 25 Orinoco (river) 139, 231 Oruro 149, 153 Osorno (peak) 188, 189 Otavalo 97, 111 Parinacota (peak) 171 Paruro 9 Pasto 213 Paucarbamba (peak) 74 Pérez Rosales (pass) 188 Perito Moreno (glacier) 205 Petrohué 189

Index of Places & Landmarks

Pichincha (peak) 93, 97-8, 101 Pichu-Pichu (peak) 59 Pico Bolívar (peak) 231 Pico Oriental (peak) 240 Pico de las Vacas (peak) 194 Pisagua 173 Pitusiray (peak) 32 Piura 39 Pongo (rapids) 77 Poopó (lake) 129 Popayán, 110 215-7 Popocatepetl 55 Portillo pass 1 Potosí 4, 23, 48, 120, 125, 139-44, 167, 171, 237 Pozuelos (lake) 159 Puente del Inca 179, 181 Puerto Blest 188 Puerto Cabello 237 Puerto Montt 189 Puerto Salagar 228 Puno 114, 128, 129, 130-133 Punta Arenas 177, 193 Punta Bandera 207 Puntiagudo (peak) 189 Puquio 9 Puracé (peak) 215 Purmamarca 163 Puyehue (peak) 189 Quillén (river) 199 Quindío 223-4 Quito 4, 18, 38, 43, 77, 79, 85, 89, 90, 92, 93-7, 98, 99, 101, 105, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 156, 225, 231 Rancas 48, 51 Rimac (river) 114 Ríobamba 13, 89 Río Manso 193 Río Turbio 207 Río Vinagre (river) 215 Rondos (peak) 74

Rucu-Pichincha (peak) 97 Rumiñahui (peak) 92 Sacsayhuamán 19, 25-6, 38, 113, 150 Saint-Exupéry (peak) 176, 207 Salamanca (peak) 176 Salcantay (peak) 28, 32, 66 Salta 163, 184, 198 San Cristóbal (peak) 69 San Francisco (pass) 184 San Francisco 193 Sangay (peak) 103 San Lorenzo (peak) 208 San Martín (lake) 194, 205 San Martín de los Andes 193, 203, 205, 208 San Pedro de Atacama 145, 198 San Pedro Nolasco 183 San Rafael 174 Santa Cruz 128, 150 Santa Cruz (river) 8, 190, 192 Santa Marta 213, 225, 237 Santiago (de Chile) 8, 100, 174, 183, 198, 208 Santiago de Chuco 35 Sarmiento (peak) 210 Soiroccocha (peak) 28 Soray (peak) 28 Sotará (peak) 215 Sucre 117, 144-5 Tacna 102 Tarma 50, 74, 114 Tchilchiuma (peak) 187 Temuco 199 Tequendama (falls) 228 Tiahuanaco 8, 112, 123, 125, 150, 242 Ticlio 114 Tilcara 161, 163 Tingo María 48 Tinta 22, 23 Tipacoque 221

265

THE ANDES

Titicaca (lake) 4, 8, 76, 113, 114, 116, 123, 131, 132, 143, 146, 147, 149, 152, 184, 197 Todos Los Santos (lake) 189 Tolima (peak) 226 Traful (lake) 193 Trujillo 5, 35, 37, 38, 44, 53, 114 Tunguiririca (peak) 178 Tungurahua (peak) 103, 112 Tupungato (peak) 210 Tupungatito (peak) 210 Ubinas (peak) 59 Upsallata (pass) 182, 192 Urubamba (river) 26, 30, 32 Ushuaia 177 Utari 53

Víbora (peak) 221 Victoria (island) 189 Vicuña 201 Viedma (lake) 205, 207 Vilcabamba 26, 28, 32-3, 87, 229 Vilcahuaman 62 Vilcanto (peak) 114 Villa Vicencia 183 Villazón 133 Yala 162 Yanahuanca 50, 51, 154 Yavi 162 Yeruá 167 Yerupaja (peak) 71 Yungay 73 Zipaquirá 225

Valdivia 101 Valera 233 Valle del Torre 176 Valparaíso 179 Veronica (peak) 28

266