The Moche Warrior (13 page)

She, on the other hand, was trying very hard to be persuasive. I had the feeling she had a proposal to make to him, and that she did not know him that well. First there was a lovely smile as she leaned toward him, then, when that appeared to have no impact, dainty tears and blowing of nose into a lace hanky. Still the man remained unmoved. Pouting was next, and then as a last resort she wriggled just enough to let one pink strap slide off her shoulder. The man leaned forward and smiled. It was not, I thought, a nice smile, rather one of victory, or perhaps anticipation.

Through all of this, I nursed my one little glass of white wine, and tried to look as if I were waiting for someone, glancing at my watch from time to time, and pretending to be a little impatient. The price of wine by the glass was so outrageous in this hotel that I had no intention of ordering another, no matter how long the two of them sat there. I ate every peanut from the little crystal bowl on the table, determined to eke out my time there and get my money’s worth. Being alone in a foreign country without the comforting presence of a credit card is an experience I would not wish to repeat.

Shortly after the shoulder strap incident, it was apparently time to leave. Carla’s companion signed the bill, thereby indicating he could afford to be a guest in this hotel. It was only then that I noticed that his right hand, which he used to hold the bill while he signed with his left, was missing the little and ring fingers.

They left the bar together. I didn’t really need to follow them any farther. It didn’t take a genius to figure out where they were headed. But I followed them just the same, at least as far as the elevator. As I went past their table, I tried to read the signature on the bill, before the waiter swept it away, but the light was too low and the signature appeared to me to be illegible. I could see the room number quite clearly, however: room 1236. I saw the two of them enter the elevator, then to confirm my suspicions, I watched the numbers over the door. It went directly to the twelfth floor. The widow Cervantes appeared to be dealing with her grief quite well.

I left the hotel and looked for a
colectivo
to take me back downtown, catching as I did so a brief glimpse of a man standing to the side of the entrance-way, who slipped into the darkness when I looked his way. Although I couldn’t say with any certainty, I could have sworn it was Ramon’s brother, Jorge.

The question was, what now? In my impulsive and one might well say ill-advised journey to solve the nasty situation in which I found myself, I had only two clues: a name, that of Ramon Cervantes, whose widow was now upstairs behaving badly—one could only assume—with a man I’d never seen before, and whom I had no reason to suspect had anything whatsoever to do with all this; and a little piece of jewelry that was probably genuine Moche. I could continue to follow the name—that is, I could wait and see where, and with whom, the widow Cervantes went next; I could go and search out Jorge, to see what light he could shed on what had happened to his brother; or I could follow the artifact, take the job in Moche territory and see what I could find.

I chose to follow the artifact. As some would say, when you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. Personally, I prefer a line penned by the poet Robert Browning:
Everyone soon or late comes round by Rome,
he wrote. Rome, in this instance, was a little town in northern Peru called Campina Vieja.

The Priestess

Still the decapitator waits, tumi blade in one hand, the other still empty. And with him the Priestess, with hair of snakes, she who holds the golden cup that soon will contain the sacred liquid, the blood of sacrifice.

While they wait at the huaca, we prepare the Warrior’s shroud. Three woven cloths will cradle him. The golden helmet with its feathered plumes, the gold and silver back flaps, the gilded bells, are placed first.

The litter that will support him on his descent lies beneath him. He rests on a second headdress, a gold crescent crowned by flamingo feathers. In his right hand we place the golden scepter, symbol of his earthly power, in his left, the silver, smaller. A gold ingot rests on his right hand, a silver on his left.

On his face we place five gold masks, on his feet, silver sandals. Three pairs of ear flares accompany him: one pair the sacred white-tailed deer, the second golden spiders, the third a feline head that represents the creature that can cross the line between the two worlds marked by the double-headed serpent
—
the world of now, the world of the ancestors.

Three pectorals of shell beads, thousands of them, in cream and green, pink and white, we have placed on his chest, wristbands to match on his arms.

Next comes his necklace of peanut beads, as always gold on his right, silver his left, sun/moon, earth/sea duality; then a second necklace of gold spiders and a third of discs of gold and turquoise.

To cover him we place his banners, his standards, symbols of his earthly powers: rough cotton onto which we have sewn golden discs and his image, the image of the warrior god. Then the shroud is wrapped around him.

The offerings are all assembled; the guardians, those among us who will accompany him, have been chosen.

Soon the ceremony in the great plaza will begin.

8

Even as I pondered which path to take, all the players in this macabre little drama, as if moved by some invisible director’s hand, were, like me, being drawn to take their place upon the stage. Some were driven by desperation, others compelled by avarice and greed, still others by obsession, and there were those still blissfully unaware of the role others, more malevolent, had chosen for them. Like stock characters in a modern morality tale—the Hero, the Villain, the Temptress, the Witch, the Magician, the Fool—from the four corners of the globe, we assembled in Campina Vieja to play the roles assigned us.

It was a concept, I’ve since thought, that would have resonated with the Inca, who called their huge, yet short-lived empire, Tahuantinsuyo, Land of the Four Quarters. At the time of the first European contact with the Americas, Tahuantinsuyo was the largest nation on earth. At its center was the glittering city of Cuzco, the navel of the Inca universe, just as Campina Vieja was to become the heart of this drama.

From the northern quarter, if you count my point of origin, Chinchaysuyu for the Inca, came I, the Narrator perhaps, or worse yet, the Fool. For me, the journey from the comforting cocoon of Lima, possessing as it does that essence that all large cities share, was an exercise in shedding my old identity, along with preconceptions, as a snake sheds its skin. It was not so much that the journey was extraordinary, just one filled with quirky moments, that made it clear that Rebecca wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

The flight to Trujillo had been uneventful, unless you count playing bingo rather than watching a movie an event, and I found the Vulkano bus station without difficulty. A bus trip in that part of the country, apparently, is an exercise in participative democracy. Passengers preoccupied themselves with shouting instructions to the driver, telling him he was lingering too long at any given stop, or that he wasn’t driving to their particular specifications.

We were on the Panamericana Norte, the Pan-American highway, that hugs a narrow strip of desert crisscrossed by river valleys, most of them dry, between the sea on one side and the Andes on the other. From time to time we’d pass a little town, sometimes a small forest or some farmland, but by and large the land on either side of the highway was desert, very dry. Sometimes I could see tire tracks leading off the highway, in what appeared to be a straight line to nowhere. In the distance are the mountains, looming up out of the sand. As austere as it may sound, it was actually quite beautiful, the colors of the desert, the golds, browns, the burnt greens, cinnamons, and dusty rose, playing against the blue-green of the sea, and the hundreds of greys, greens, navy blues, and purples of the mountains.

And what of the other characters? the other quarters? From the south, Collasuyu, comes the Magician.

With the help of several vocal backseat drivers, the bus driver stopped regularly to disgorge passengers and pick up others, sometimes in little towns, more often than not at a marker—a little stand or a sign— at the side of the highway.

At one of these stops, a young couple loaded down with enormous backpacks got on. They both looked about fifteen to me, but to be realistic I’d put them in their early twenties. Gringos. She wore jeans with holes at the knees; a halter top that revealed her suntanned middle and a hint of navel; lots of jewelry, most notably silver rings on every finger and a pair of long silver earrings that looked vaguely Navaho; and a halo of long wavy hair around a small face that gave her the appearance of a Titian Madonna. He had hair almost as long as hers, cutoff jeans, a T-shirt frayed at the shoulders where the sleeves had been removed, and a neat little row of tiny safety pins in one ear. On one arm he had a large tattoo with a skull and crossbones and a succinct suggestion that the Establishment—such an antiquated term—perform an anatomical impossibility on itself. As they passed my seat, I idly wondered if their parents, particularly hers, knew where they were and what they were doing. Advancing middle age can be tiresome.

Several moments after the bus started rolling again, the young man walked to the front of the bus and, turning to face the crowd, pulled out a deck of cards. He spoke no Spanish, and, with the exception of me, no one else on the bus spoke English, but he kept up a patter that would have made a showman proud, and soon had everyone’s attention as he demonstrated several card tricks. After that, he took a newspaper, asked in sign language for one of the men sitting in the front seats to check it out carefully, folded it into a cone shape, and then, pulling a bottle of water out of a bag he carried with him, poured the water into the cone. He then very quickly inverted the cone over the head of the nearest passenger, who ducked away, much to the amusement of the other passengers. No water came out of the cone. There was a smattering of applause. He grinned, and then, still talking, poured water out of the cone and back into the jar.

There was even louder applause this time and I could certainly see why. While I’m not exactly a fan of magic acts, I had to admit the young man was very good. He had no sleeves in which to hide anything, and I was close enough to be able to watch him pretty carefully. I could not see how he had done it. He did a couple of other tricks, one with a coin, and another with a plastic tube, both of them equally baffling. As he came to the end of his performance, the young woman made her way from the back of the bus with a baseball cap and began to collect tips. I could see that those ahead of me had given very small coins, brown ones which I knew to be almost worthless by North American standards, and although I knew I had to be careful with money, I gave the Peruvian equivalent of about three dollars. The young woman looked suitably impressed with my generosity as my coins dropped into the hat, and a few minutes after the act was finished, the young man plopped into the seat beside me.

“Speak English?” he asked. I nodded. He was an American.

“The name’s Puma, after the wild cat that roams around here,” he said. “My girlfriend’s name is Pachamama. That’s the native word for Mother Earth. They aren’t our real names,” he added, “just ones we’re using for now.”

I would never have guessed. Not that I could be judgmental. “I’m Rebecca,” I said, taking his proffered handshake and complimenting him on his magic act.

“What are you doin‘ in the back of beyond?” he said. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

“I’m going to work at an archaeological site,” I replied.

“Wow!” he exclaimed. “Amazing!”

“How about you?” I asked politely.

“We’ve been doin‘ the sites, Inca mainly, down south. But now we’re gonna join a bunch of people, a commune sorta, not too far from here. We’re gonna grow our own food and stuff.”

How sixties, I thought. “What a lovely idea,” I said.