Authors: Tahir Shah
Thousands of rare textiles have been unearthed in Peru, spanning as far back as 3000 bc. These days they are regarded as more precious than gold, just as they were to the people who made them. No other region on Earth can boast a longer textile history. The work must have called for a communal effort, bringing llama wool from the mountains, dyeing it, designing patterns, spinning, weaving and embroidering. Centuries before the first lump of Latin American clay was worked into a pot, Paracas was a centre for textile production.
With allegorical flight in mind, I studied the textiles, searching for clues. Woven into the fabric were a wild assortment of images, including hundreds of Birdmen. The main figures were comprised of sub-images. In the wings of the Birdmen were rows of trophy heads, serpents and daggers. They had streamers spewing from their mouths and ornamental crowns. All were awash with colour, as if inspired by a psychedelic dream.
The flight of these Birdmen wasn’t forced and cumbersome like real flight. It was graceful and easy, like an angel wafting through a dream. A few of the mantles bore rows of ‘falling’ shamans, plunging Earthward with glazed expressions. Perhaps these were clues that the Birdmen flew, at least within the limits of their minds.
*
Not far from Paracas is the town of Pisco. It is inextricably linked with vampires. Cast an eye across its Plaza de Armas, and you will see members of the vampire cult. They come to the town in their hundreds. Dressed in black coats and matching boots, with lines of kohl circling their eyes, punky hair pushed up in quiffs, they sit on the benches, waiting for the night.
I wasn’t really interested in vampires, but a chewing-gum seller said I’d regret it if I didn’t look into the town’s fiendish tradition. So I hailed an Indian-made auto-rickshaw and told the driver to head for the cemetery on Calle San Francisco.
Standing outside the graveyard was a man selling enormous blooms of chrysanthemums. He asked if I wanted to buy flowers; I replied that I wasn’t sure who I’d come to see.
A few steps further and a guide offered his services.
‘Come to see Sarah Ellen?’ he asked.
‘Um, yes, I think so.’
‘She’s over here.’
As he led the way down to the other end of the graveyard, he told me the legend.
‘She was a young English girl,’ he said. ‘She died and was buried here in 1913. No one knows much about her … but a few years ago your vampire friends started arriving.’
‘But I’m not a vampire.’
The guide looked me in the eye.
‘Are you sure?’
I nodded earnestly.
He pointed to a grave set into a wall.
‘Perhaps you are telling the truth,’ he said. ‘It’s women who come mostly, from all over the world. From France and Germany, Australia and Japan. They bribe the police, so that they can spend the night here.’
‘Do they lay flowers?’ I asked.
‘Hah!’ came the reply. ‘No, they don’t leave flowers, but they leave other things.’ ‘What?’
‘Bits of meat, strange amulets and dead cats with their heads cut off. Some of them have tried to open the grave,’ he said. ‘I think they want to take un recuerdo, a souvenir.’
‘A souvenir?’
The guardian wiped a hand over the plaque.
‘A finger, a hand, something like that, something to take away and show to their friends.’
*
The Ormeño bus from Pisco to the Peruvian capital was so plush that the backpacker sitting beside me took off his shoes and socks and nuzzled his toes into the thick-pile carpet. We glided up the coast road, the triple-glazed windows tinting the light, and muting the sound of the wheels. I stared out at the desert, which stretched to the east like a silvery-grey bedspread of sand. In the few places where it had been irrigated, maize and bananas thrived. Dousing the dust with a little water is like touching it with a magic wand.
The backpacker fished out a crumpled guide to Peru and thumbed through it. From the state of the book, I could see he’d been on the road for months. He seemed on edge, eager to share his enthusiasm for this rare luxury. I knew he was English even before he opened his mouth, because an Englishman abroad is always reluctant to be the first to break the ice. He wriggled his toes and thumbed harder through the book.
‘D’you see the deformed skulls in Paracas?’ he blurted, ‘the ones which look like alien heads?’
I replied that I had.
‘I’ve just bought one,’ he said, pointing to a dented steel box on the luggage rack. ‘What are you going to do with a deformed skull?’
‘It’s for my museum.’
For the rest of the journey, the shoeless backpacker informed me of his lifelong passion - a museum of curiosities. The collection, built up over twenty years, already boasted a number of important objects: a pickled tumour from a dead woman’s groin, an Eskimo’s seal-intestine coat, death masks from China, and a selection of trepanned skulls. He even had an ‘exotic mermaid’ - half-baboon, half-fish -faked in Victorian England. The man claimed to have turned his Merseyside house into a shrine, devoted to freakery. Modern museums, he said, were fearful places, packed with dreary objects. Building on the foundations of the past, his collection was full of spirit.
His aim was to match the museum of Peter the Great. The Russian Czar’s storehouse had been packed floor to ceiling with oddities. Many of the exhibits were still breathing. There were live children with two heads, sheep with five feet, and a variety of deformed babies. The caretaker was a dwarf with two fingers on each hand and a pair of toes on each foot. When the dwarf died, he was stuffed and plonked on the shelves with the other exhibits.
The coach trundled through las barriadas, Lima’s shanty-towns. Veiled behind high municipal walls, they hid a world of burden, very different from the luxurious bubble that was the Ormeño bus. The interlocking maze of wooden shacks stand testimony to those who’ve come in search of a better life. Lured by the prospect of magnificent wealth, theirs is a life of unimaginable hardship. They survive on less than nothing. Once they have tasted the drug of the metropolis they can never return home.
Lima’s traffic stop-starts its way down the choked highways, jolting forward a few inches at a time. No one questions the lack of speed, they’re used to it. Unwinding their windows, they make the most of the ride. Weaving between the cars are thousands of vendedores ambulantes, street-sellers. Whatever you want to buy, they have it stuffed into their sacks. Bubble gum and baseball caps, playing cards and fluffy dice, posters of Marilyn Monroe and maps of France, light-bulbs and eyelash curlers, ball-point pens and sellotape. In a city where wages are so spectacularly low, even respectable professionals can be found on the streets supplementing their income after work.
I don’t know what manner of lunacy came over me, but I checked in to Lima’s Hotel Gran Bolivar. The old lady of Lima society, built in 1924, the Bolivar was once the place to be seen. It’s a colossus of a building, haughty and proud, with birch-white walls and a formidable entrance on Plaza San Martin. An hour of bargaining secured a grand suite on the third floor, at the knock-down price of $25. The manager appeared anxious for custom, as the place was virtually empty.
The bellboy led the way down a palatial corridor. He stopped at a tremendous doorway, flanked by fluted columns. As he slipped the solid brass key into the lock, my conscience beckoned me. How could I stay in such luxury after seeing shanty-towns minutes before? I was racked with guilt, and was about to deliberate on my fortune. But the tour of the suite had begun.
The hardwood doors were dark with lacquer, their knobs moulded with the hotel’s monogram. A study led from the dining-room which overlooked the Plaza. The curtains, which were double-lined, reeked of a time when curtains were a detail of luxury rather than merely an accessory to keep out the light. Like the others, the drawing-room was tiled in herringbone parquet. The veneer of its cocktail bar was chipped, where generations of shakers had been forced down a little too hard. The bellboy pointed out anterooms and cubby-holes, a writing desk with secret drawers, and a vast walk-in closet with an automatic light. Then he rocked on his heels waiting for a tip.
When he had gone, I telephoned an old family friend, living in the exclusive Miraflores district of Lima. She burst into tears when I told her where I was staying.
‘Leave at once!’ she said. ‘It’s so dangerous there. Everyone knows the Bolivar’s haunted by the woman with the butcher’s cleaver.’
‘But my door is locked.’
‘She can enter any room by passing through the walls’ said my friend. ‘She’ll hack off your head and drink your blood.’
I told her about the monogrammed door handles, the parquet floors, the lagoon-like bath, and the lack of other guests.
‘Why do you think the place is empty?’ she said. ‘Everyone knows of la señora que carga un hacha de cocina, the woman with the meat cleaver.’
‘But I’ve paid in advance.’
‘I don’t care what you’ve paid’ she said coldly. ‘But spend a night in that hotel and you’ll be dead before morning.’
The round bar at Hotel Gran Bolivar was once known as the ‘Snake Pit’, because every socialite tongue could be found there, hissing gossip. These days it’s hardly patronised at all. Bartenders are positioned at strategic points around the salon, waiting for the bustle of clientele which never comes. Their bow-ties are tight, their hair groomed back with brilliantine, and their eyes alert. Each evening, the small dancefloor at the centre of the room is swept and polished with beeswax. But years have passed since feet last swanned over its parquet.
Despite my friend’s fretting, I survived the night at Gran Bolivar. I’d seen no ghosts, but had woken with an excruciating headache. It felt as if I’d been clubbed with a baseball bat, but the woman with the cleaver had left me alone.
After breakfast, I set out into the river of honking traffic in search of Professor Cabieses. The street corners were jam-packed with moneychangers, clutching rolls of dollar bills. They vied for space with a swarm of hawkers, selling potted plastic flowers and hurricane lamps, frying pans, Zippos and chicks dyed pink. One man ran into the road with his stock of squirming puppies. Anywhere else motorists might be uninterested in snapping up a dog. But in Lima, where there’s a deep mistrust of retail stores, the street is the only place to shop.
The Peruvian capital gets a bad rap from tourists. They say it’s rundown and dangerous, that the sewers stink and that everyone you meet is out to either rob or kill you. It is partly true. I’ve never known another city where a waiter chains your bag to the table, or where the knifings are more common.
At its height, Lima was one of the grandest cities on the continent. It was rated as more beautiful than Paris, as refined as Rome. Stroll in the backstreets off Plaza de Armas and the flamboyant baroque doorways, heavy with crests and friezes glare down. Like the enclosed balconies of the palacios, the palaces, they signify the opulence of a colonial power with a point to prove. But the high life came to an abrupt end in 1746 when a great earthquake struck. Most of the resplendent villas and colonnades, the plazas and the palacios, were reduced to dust.
In the century which followed, the wars of independence slashed the capital’s population, as Limenos were sent to the front lines. With time, their city was rebuilt, but it never regained its majesty.
A few telephone calls tracked Cabieses to a large teaching hospital near Miraflores. An elite suburb, the area is reserved for those who have made it. In Miraflores rich women walk in Italian shoes. With their hair swirled up like candyfloss, they prowl the pavements, flashing off their jewels. The streets are free of vendedores ambulantes. There’s no one touting moss-green lizards or surgical gloves, and the only smell is of espresso brewing on spotless stalls.
Professor Cabieses’ secretary mumbled that he had gone to a neurosurgical conference and would be back in a week. I said that I’d thought the doctor was an authority on drugs. In a secretive voice, the assistant replied that Dr Cabieses was an expert in many things.
Again my journey had been becalmed. With a full week to kill, I cursed myself for conducting a search where any answers proved soon to be further questions. What began as a trail of feathers, was becoming a trial of unfulfilled hope. I went to the concierge of Hotel Gran Bolivar for words of comfort. He pushed me towards a taxi. Museo del Oro, the Gold Museum, was the only thing worth seeing in Lima, he said.
No one was quite certain when Miguel Mujica Gallo founded his remarkable museum, which nestles in the suburb of Monterrico. I cannot think of a greater shrine to the art of collecting. A treasure trove, it’s brimming with loot. Even before I’d got into the main body of the building, I found myself wading through Gallo’s less important collection - several hundred thousand weapons. He had bought up just about everything one might care to look at, from General Custer’s revolver to a set of rare Persian helmets.
The scope of Gallo’s museum was impressive, but the size of the collection was almost irrelevant; it was his collecting spirit that mattered. That spirit, I reflected, had kindled my current journey. Everyone ought to be working on a collection of some kind. I would count myself as a collector of tsantsas, shrunken heads, even though I have yet to afford one. When I was nine my aunt explained to me that a man without a collection was like a house without a roof. She presented me with a triple-edged Malayan dagger-cane, and advised me to collect sword-sticks, which I have done ever since.
Most of Museo del Oro was devoted to artefacts from pre-Incan Peru. There were textiles of Birdmen and funerary dolls, macaw-feather cloaks, Chancay ceramics, ritualistic daggers, mummies, and a dazzling accumulation of gold ornaments. But, for my money, all the rest was eclipsed by four understated objects. Two of them were skulls adorned with yellow and blue feathers. The other two were figurines. About two feet high, they were covered in bright feathers as well, and had crude jeering faces. In their hands were trophy heads.